
Book.___^^ 

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C.OPMRIGUT DEPOSIE 



THE COW 





THE OPEN COUNTRY BOOKS 


A 


Company of Genial Little Books about the 




Out-of-Doors 




Under the Editorship of 




L. H. BAILEY 


1. 


The Apple-Tree . . . . L. H. Bailey 


2. 


A Home Vegetable-Garden . 




Ella M. Freeman 


3. 


The Cow . . . Jared van Wagenen, Jr. 


4. 


Vacation on the Trail, Eugene Davenport 






S 0) 

bo 

=« a; 






iS s 



M 



The Open Country Books — No. 3 



THE COW 



BY 
JARED VAN WAGENEN, Je. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1922 

All rights reserved 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 






Copyright, 1922, 
Bt the macmillan company. 



Set up and printed. Published October, 1922. 



OCT 18 ^Z' 

Press of 
J. J. Little & Ives Company- 
New York. U. S. A. 

©CUC86363 

/WD i 



TO 

THE BY-GONE MEN OF HILL- 
SIDE FARM WHO WERE DAIRYMEN 
ACCORDING TO THE LIGHT OF 
VHEIR DAY AND GENERATION 



PREFACE 

This little book does not pretend to be a text- 
book nor a treatise on dairy husbandry, for there 
are plenty of such books already. It is simply an 
effort to set down the ideas of a dairyman concern- 
ing his own business and to view the cow as a very 
interesting animal who after all these thousands 
of years of close companionship with man still re- 
tains many primal instincts and many hereditary 
tendencies. So we may ask the meaning of old 
winding cow-paths and little calves hidden in the 
bushes and the tragedy of the herd bull condemned 
to spend his days tied to a post by a ring in his 
nose (like Sampson, old and blind, grinding meal 
for his conquerers) when his place is to march 
proudly at the head of his obedient herd. 

Dairying has grown into a vast and complex and 
exceedingly modern business, conducted in great 
manufacturing establishments with white tile and 
steam sterilizers and pure cultures and bacterial 
counts; yet there ought to be a place to revive at 
least the memory of old farm houses under great 
trees and herds winding down the road at milking- 
time, and farm women making butter in cool spring- 
houses or shadowy white-washed cellars. Such 



viii PREFACE 

things were still within the memory of him who 
writes, nor is he old. And it is confidently hoped 
that this attempt will have very direct and prac- 
tical value to the present-day dairyman, for he 
cannot expect his best success unless he has a real 
regard for his cow and likes to read about her. 

Farm butter-and-cheese-making are rapidly go- 
ing the way of the farm spinning-wheel and the 
loom. Horace Bushnell, Connecticut preacher and 
author, speaking at a town centennial in the 
middle of the last century and looking back on the 
memory of his youth and the domestic manufac- 
tures of that time, lingeringly and lovingly called 
it the "Golden Age of Homespun." The corre- 
sponding age of dairying is about to go forever, and 
in some respects the world will be the poorer 
thereby ; but this at least remains : That we men 
who would farm not only for to-day or to-morrow 
but for the generations yet unborn must have the 
animal as part of the farm scheme. Agricultural 
content and permanent prosperity are typified best 
not by a plow on a field arable, but by flocks and 
herds winding over green pastures. 

So this little volume is not an attempt to reduce 
cow-keeping to cold demonstrations of chemistry 
and physiology and bacteriology — and cash — but 
rather to strike the personal note and to speak of 
dairying on one old hill farm and to put into lan- 
guage a little of the glow and the glamour of real 
farm life. Jared van Wagbnen, Je. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAflE 

I. The Kingdom of the Cow 1 

II. Concerning the Cow Herself 9 

III. The Similitude of the Cow 25 

IV. The Cow, Mentally and Instinctively . . 33 

V. Concerning Cow-Pastures and Cow-Paths , 43 

VI. Concerning Old Stone Walls and Cows and 

Other Things 61 

VII. The Cow Tribes 71 

VIII. The Rearing of the Calf 82 

IX. The Care of the Milking Herd .... 89 

X. The Health of the Herd 99 

XI. The Depreciation and the Renewal of the 

Dairy Herd 107 

XII. The Judging of Cows 116 

XIII. The Dairy Farmstead 124 

XIV. The Construction of the Dairy Bam . . 133 
XV. Concerning Dairying as a Business . . . 141 



THE COW 



THE KINGDOM OF THE COW 

As the Pilgrim journeys through the Farm 
Country, he may come to the long reaches of the 
great river where luxuriant plenty broods over the 
land, where the smooth landscape lies in checkered 
squares, where the flat grain fields stretch away to 
the horizon and the earth yields her increase to 
even a careless husbandry. In regions such as 
these are grown the grains that figure in the prod- 
uce exchanges of the world. When the Pilgrim 
leaves behind him the broad stretches of the fertile 
plain and sets his face toward the Hill Country, he 
will come to a pleasant land where the brooks run 
in narrow valleys and rocky pasture fields fenced 
by old stone walls cling to the slopes of the hills 
and springs of pure water bubble up beside the 
road. He will find close snuggled in the elbow of 
the valley old farmsteads under spreading trees, 
and perhaps a row of shining milk-cans sunning 
beside the kitchen door. Then there will be big 
red bams with silos, and on the alluvial soils along 

1 



2 THE COW 

the water course and climbing a little way up the 
hills will be close-turfed luxuriant meadows and 
young corn fields shining and dancing in the 
breeze. If it be near evening there will be merry 
children coming home from school and patient 
herds with full udders waiting at the bars for milk- 
ing-time, and boys coming for the cows will call 
to them "Co-boss, Co-boss, Co-boss" — the same call- 
ing-cry that English-speaking farm folk have 
known for many centuries. By these tokens the 
Pilgrim shall know that he has come unto the 
Kingdom of the Cow, for be it noted that the cow 
comes into her own and rules unquestioned only 
where Nature has not been too kind. 

So it will be best for us at the beginning frankly 
to recognize the fact that most of us are dairymen 
by force of circumstances. Of course, every good 
farm is suitable for cow-keeping, but when we 
speak of a "dairy-farm" we really mean one which 
is capable of giving good returns when used in this 
way, but which can hardly be recommended for 
general agriculture. A cursory survey of the typi- 
cal farm scheme of different localities will demon- 
strate the correctness of the general statement 
that where lands are fertile, level and easily tilled 
and climatic conditions are kindly, men steadfastly 
refuse to milk many cows. The truth is that we are 
all as lazy as we dare to be, and on land naturally 
fertile and adapted to the use of modem machinery 
it is possible to make a living by types of farming 



THE KINGDOM OF THE COW 3 

that demand less sustained effort and skill than 
dairying. For this reason the typical corn-belt 
farmer is not a dairyman, nor is he likely to be- 
come one. I am not sure but that deep down in 
his heart he really despises the man who will milk 
a cow, deeming it women's work or worse. Rather 
would he guide his three-horse draught team and 
riding plow, laying the long furrows of his quar- 
ter-section, or see his shocks of wheat standing like 
the tents of an army in orderly array or lave his 
hands in the stream of golden grain as it pours 
from the threshing machine. Not for him is the 
cow with her bovine ways and the personal service 
and undeviating round of attention which she ex- 
acts from those who would succeed through her. 
Yet unconsciously he fills his place in our agricul- 
tural economy, for some one must grow the world's 
coarse, cheap, staple crops of wheat and corn and 
hay. He and his ilk may be said to follow agri- 
culture along the line of least resistance. His (ex- 
cepting only the gi-azier) is the type of farming 
that calls for the minimum of both labor and skill. 
Under favorable conditions, i.e., with abundant 
fertility and good markets, it may yield ample re- 
turns and may accumulate considerable agricul- 
tural wealth, but if unintelligently followed the 
end is confusion. It is soil-mining rather than 
permanent agriculture. Sooner or later come fall- 
ing crop yields, and with them social and economic 
decay unless a system of purchased plant-food and 



4 THE COW 

humus-maintenance be introduced. In the past 
this soil-miner has been only a sojourner in the 
land with his face set toward the new country of 
our unconquered West. Kecently he and we have 
rather suddenly awakened to the fact that there 
are no more great undiscovered agricultural em- 
pires in America, and this has resulted in much 
writing and orating and taking stock of our agri- 
cultural resources. 

There is another and very much higher type of 
farmer who is a gardener and fruit-grower rather 
than a dairyman. In localities favored as to soils 
and market conditions, horticulture has possibili- 
ties of production and profits that are undreamed- 
of in dairying. Always, however, large areas of 
the less favored lands of this country can best be 
utilized in maintaining cows. There are some con- 
spicuous examples of successful fruit-growing on 
lands that do not readily lend themselves to gen- 
eral crop production, but broadly speaking our 
dairy lands are those which, on account of de- 
ficient plant-food, steepness, presence of stone or 
poor drainage, are not utilized for cereal cropping 
and at the same time have no horticultural adapta- 
bility. 

Just which farms and localities belong to this 
category is a matter of individual judgment and 
community experience. Perhaps 75 per cent of 
New York and an even larger proportion of New 
England farms will find their best possibilities 



THE KINGDOM OF THE COW 5 

when used for dairy purposes. In the South and 
West the percentage is smaller, while in the best 
of the corn-belt country dairying is usually inci- 
dental to other agricultural methods. In a general 
way, all those farms in the East where pastur- 
age is necessarily an important part of the scheme 
are typical dairy farms. Some steep and rocky 
fields now used for pasture properly belong to the 
class of forest lands. There are other areas too 
thin and poor to be grazed profitably by milch 
cows, which in large units might possibly be 
utilized for sheep, especially those of the Merino 
type. In the West it is the sheep and the steer 
rather than the cow that promise the best use of 
the semi-arid regions. Taken all in all, the old 
northeastern states, together with Minnesota and 
Wisconsin, may fairly be termed the Kingdom of 
the Cow. 

Of course, fertility and topography are not the 
only factors that determine the location of the 
dairy industry. Climate, especially in the past, 
has played a most important part. Before the in- 
troduction of artificial refrigeration, the handling 
of dairy products required ice or at least cold 
spring water and cold cellars for storage. These 
essential conditions restricted the industry to the 
North. Even now, cow-keeping has never attained 
any large place below Mason and Dixon's line. 
This failure of dairying to establish itself in the 
South has a social as well as a climatic signifi- 



6 THE COW 

cance, for the negro, either slave or free, has always 
been the main dependence for agricultural labor, 
and as a race they are perhaps less calculated than 
any other to bring to the cow the intelligence and 
systematic attention necessary for success. In 
fact, the distribution of our various types of agri- 
culture is in many ways a matter of racial stocks. 
Up in some of the northern counties of New York 
and over across the line in the domain of King 
George are localities where dairying is supreme — 
where we find Presbyterian churches and spotted 
Ayrshire cattle and big, high-stepping Clydesdale 
horses and strong-featured men with a burr-r-r in 
their speech. These are Scotsmen who sought a 
better country, but have remained most loyal to 
the animals and the worship of the homeland. It 
is this same Scot who has given to the ancient 
dairy county of Delaware, in New York, not only 
stern standards of living but also perhaps the most 
highly specialized dairying in America. Likewise 
in the Middle West and in Minnesota and Wiscon- 
sin, it has been the Dane and the Hollander and 
the Swede, together with the emigrant from old 
New England, that have turned much of these 
states into cow pastures. On the other hand, the 
Italian and the man from eastern Europe turns 
very readily to horticulture. He trims vines and 
grows onions and potatoes and garden truck, and 
with the aid of his mate and brood cuddles and 
caresses the earth into fruitfulness, for he is to the 



THE KINGDOM OF THE COW 7 

manor bom, but only slowly does he come to love 
the cow. 

Of course, to a certain extent, markets are a 
determinative factor in the distribution of the 
dairy industry. However, the years tend to level 
advantages in this regard. Markets are a matter 
of time and accessibility rather than of distance 
and freight rates. Better transportation, together 
with a little sound dairy bacteriology, have greatly 
extended the zone of market milk production. 
Fast express service and refrigerator cars have 
made it seem very simple to carry milk in first- 
class condition for many hundred miles. A short 
stretch of muddy country road is a greater handi- 
cap than a hundred times as far of gleaming steel 
rails. Both New York and Boston draw their milk 
supply from at least six different states. Possibili- 
ties like these are upsetting our old ideas of market 
advantages. This was not always so. Orange 
County once deemed that it had a natural monop- 
oly of the New York City milk trade, and not 
so long ago "up state" butter went west to Chica- 
go. Men were glad to believe that there was a 
mystical something in the air or the water or the 
grass that would forever bar the cow from the 
Mississippi Valley. Any hope of this kind has 
proved but "a vain thing for safety," for the cow 
has constantly found her way into farther places. 
Nearby markets are no more necessary for milk 
than for small-fruits and perishable vegetables. 



8 THE COW 

This much at least is certain: that with the 
years the Kingdom of the Cow is a constantly 
widening empire. Even like the sheep of which 
Vergil wrote, she "hath a golden hoof." To some 
one-time fertile regions she comes late, but she 
comes to save. When the soil-miner has wrought 
his perfect wort and the earth no longer gives her 
increase — when seed for the sower and bread for 
the eater grow scanty — then the cow comes to the 
rescue. From the beginning she has exemplified 
the doctrine of soil conservation. Where she makes 
the land her own, green carpets of pasture possess 
the fields, alfalfa throws its perfume to the breeze 
and corn waves and rustles in the sunshine. There 
great new barns rise in place of the old, and white- 
walled farmsteads speak of peace and plenty. 
There contented farm folk found dynasties by 
striking the roots of their lives deep into the soil. 
"And of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." 



II 

CONCERNING THE COW HERSELF 

There is somewhere a story about a painting in 
which the menagerie is represented as trooping up 
the gang-plank into the ark in orderly array, ac- 
companied by Noah himself, carefully bearing a 
tin box inscribed, "Papers relating to the origin 
of the DeLevis family." Very much the same sort 
of loving service has been rendered by the natural- 
ist to the cow. The geologists have patiently dug 
the million-year-old skeletons of her forebears out 
of the earth and have christened them with long 
hard names, and the zoologists have taken their 
present-day and extinct representatives and have 
referred them to one or to several species, each 
man according to his own ideas of the philosophy 
of classification. We may dip but lightly into zo- 
ology by saying that all our domestic cattle are of 
European origin and perhaps the dominant species, 
Bos tauriis, may do for a family name. If we are 
born zoologists rather than dairymen, we may read 
books with prints of fossil skeletons and skull 
measurements and discussions of dentition for- 
mulae, and may at least have the satisfaction of 

9 



10 THE COW 

finding out that Bos taurus was a variable species ; 
and after that we can leave the matter to the com- 
parative anatomist. 

In the conformation and the habits of the pres- 
ent-day cow there are many things we cannot un- 
derstand unless we suppose them to be reversions 
to something in the remote ancestry. The expand- 
ing science of genetics may change our conceptions 
of some of these matters; yet even genetics is 
based strongly on the conception of the continuity 
of heredity. It is pleasant to conjure the past and 
to try to explain contemporaneous facts on tenden- 
cies we assume to have been present through the 
long course of time, unless, indeed, we can dem- 
onstrate their origin now and then in modem 
nutrition or other factors. By this practice of ret- 
rospect we endeavor to reconstruct for ourselves 
something of the conditions of the earth and of 
man in vast former time. 

For our purpose let us rest content with the 
general statement that for unknown centuries 
and up until early historic times, wild cattle 
roamed the forests of Central and Northern Europe 
and the British Isles, presumably entirely undo- 
mesticated and uncontrolled. Very fortunately, in 
certain old European parks, a few specimens of 
these cattle have been preserved so that we may 
know something of their appearance and habits. 
Their color markings at least were peculiar. They 
seem to have been great brutes, typically white in 



CONCEENING THE COW HEESELF 11 

color, with brown or black ears; even today there 
is an occasional reversion to the ancestral type. 
Solid white is not an infrequent color among 
Shorthorns, and a good many years ago on Hillside 
Farm we came into possession of a rather elderly 
cow of dubious quality and checkered ancestry. 
She was even as the "milk-white bull" on which 
Priscilla, bride of John Alden, rode on her wed- 
ding day, but her ears were brown. I used to say 
to myself and her: "Old cow, you are the heir of 
all the ages. Your ancestral story goes back and 
links with the days when Abraham drove forth 
his herds from Ur of the Chaldees and Job's sheep 
lay sick in the land of Uz, and drowsing shepherds 
watched their flocks beneath the stars on the plains 
of Shinar. In you there may be the blood of fa- 
mous Shorthorn sires and the blood of dairy 
queens. It may be a thousand generations ago some 
far-off savage men had first dominion over you. 
Your characters have been buried beneath the accu- 
mulated mass piled up by many masters and chang- 
ing environment, yet once again, like the geologic 
outcrop of buried strata, that long forgotten color 
of the wild ox has reappeared in you." 

This white cow with her brown ears was a truly 
remarkable example of color reversion such as 
would not appear once in many thousand times, 
but many cattle show dark patches inside the ears 
which may fairly be regarded as a tendency to hark 
back to primitive coloring. We forget, perhaps, 



12 THE COW 

how almost infinitely long is the history of the do- 
mestication of animals. Indeed, in the case of 
cattle, so far as exact names and dates and opera- 
tions are concerned, there is very little before the 
great Thomas Bakewell and contemporary breeders 
less than two centuries ago, but its beginnings go 
back before our books and beyond tradition and 
even beyond the days when were accumulated the 
mounds of refuse in front of the cave-man's door. 

We are fond of dwelling on the great gulf that 
separates our excellent dairy cow from her forest- 
roaming ancestor, and it is all true, yet, after all, 
the veneer of domestication — or shall we call it 
civilization — is very thin. The cow, as also man, 
is still an animal of many primitive impulses and 
hereditary memories. So long as she is undis- 
turbed, she seems very much a creature of habit. 
As Isaiah long ago wrote, "The ass knoweth his 
owner and the ox his master's crib." She stands 
patiently at the pasture bars and answers the call 
of her owner and does violence to all the instincts 
of her motherhood by unresistingly offering her 
udder to the hand of her milker, yet in time of 
stress she seems very quickly to fall back into her 
primitive wildness. 

I have repeatedly seen young heifers turned into 
a back pasture for the summer who, owing to lack 
of attention and contact with man, have "gone 
wild" and in a few months have forgotten all the 



CONCERNING THE COW HERSELF 13 

external evidences of domestication. The heifer 
that in spring was so much a part of the barn 
family that she could hardly be made to step out 
of your path and that would follow like a dog 
with the hope of a word and a lick of salt, is, 
capable of apparently forgetting in a few weeks 
her age-long training and contact with man. I 
have seen them sniffing the breeze with elevated 
head and distended nostril and flickering ears, and 
at sight of their one-time master bounding wildly 
away through thickets and over fences, nor hesi- 
tating, if cornered, to turn and fiercely fight him 
who under normal conditions they fully recognized 
both as master and protector. Once having re- 
verted to this condition, they will keep to the 
woods by day and feed by night, and can be re- 
claimed only by the art of the trapper or even the 
hunter. Yet if brought to bay and established 
under the care of man, the domestication of cen- 
turies promptly reasserts itself and the old de- 
pendence on man and trust in him comes back 
completely. 

It ought to be said in passing that in this respect 
at least, the domestication of sheep seems much 
more complete than that of cattle. Sheep seem to 
have more of dependence and something allied to 
affection. They learn to answer to a calling-cry 
much better than cattle and to follow and obey to 
a greater extent. I have never known sheep, no 



14 THE COW 

matter how long neglected, to fail to welcome the 
coming of the master by crowding around him with 
long bleating of welcome. 

So, too, we must not blame the bull because he 
is sometimes sullen and often wild and dangerous, 
for after all, he is merely true to the instincts by 
virtue of which he went lowing at the head of his 
band of females and fought off his rivals and held 
his place only by the ordeal of combat. The life 
we condemn him to lead is itself the tragedy of the 
farm world, and as he stands wearing out his 
years in solitude and loneliness, chained by his 
nose in a darkened stall, I wonder does he ever 
have flashes of hereditary memory or tantalizing 
dreams of a far-off time when he stalked the wood- 
land at the head of his herd, master of all he met, 
and the valleys echoed to his roar and the earth 
trembled to his battle charge? May we not fairly 
assume that the fierceness of bulls is now the com- 
paratively feeble survival of a once most vital but 
now long disused character, which we may sup- 
pose is slowly dying as the generations pass? We 
must not blame him for what he cannot help. He 
may never be a playfellow for our children, and 
we must always consider him as a potentially dan- 
gerous brute whose pent-up instincts may suddenly 
flame forth in uncontrollable fury; yet even the 
bull is not insensible to the power of kindness and 
we must use him with gentleness, remembering 
what his nature bids him be. 



CONCERNING THE COW HERSELF 15 

Doubtless it is true that with the progress of 
domestication our animals, even as man himself, 
are leaving behind them many characters which 
were once supremely vital, but under changed en- 
vironment are first disused and then forgotten. 
A number of such questions are connected with 
baby calves and bovine motherhood. 

Unquestionably there was a time when the cow 
brought forth her young only in the spring, merely 
because it was then that the weather was warm 
and the grass green and abundant, and hence the 
calf born then stood the best chance of survival; 
and so by the stern law of biology, this spring-time 
birth became a firmly fixed character of the cow, 
ingrained into her very constitution through long 
centuries. But when cattle come to be kept under 
the entirely artificial conditions of regular care 
and certain shelter and assured food supply at all 
seasons, this spring-time birth habit ceased to be 
advantageous and has been largely lost, although 
it seems that even now the birth time tends to 
coincide with the ascending sun. 

On the other hand, as has been noted, sheep seem 
in some ways to be more truly domesticated than 
cattle, but so far as the lambing time is concerned, 
they obey ancestral habits more closely than the 
cow. The mating instinct in sheep lies practic- 
ally dormant during the summer months, arousing 
only when the cool autumn nights come on; and 
80 the normal lamb is born with the coming of 



16 THE COW 

spring sunshine. The rearing of the so-called "hot- 
house lamb" makes it most desirable to have the 
young dropped in the early winter; but in this, 
with every effort, only partial success is possible. 
The same spring-tide reproduction is noted in poul- 
try, for egg-laying practically ceases in the three 
months farthest removed from April and May; 
and the wild fauna of our fields and woods render 
almost perfect obedience to this same law. The 
fact that the cow and the horse have largely 
forgotten this ancestral trait bears testimony 
to the vast period of time which must have elapsed 
since they became subject to the control of man. 

Other phenomena connected with maternity are 
being modified with the generations. For example, 
in those breeds of fowls in which the egg-laying 
tendency is most highly developed, the instinct 
of the female to sit upon the eggs to incubate them 
is surely far weaker than once it was and has be- 
come most uncertain and capricious. Doubtless 
there was a far-off time when the cow guarded her 
young calf most jealously and, if necessary, fought 
off the wolf and bear, with lowering head and 
flashing horns, although she does not, like the 
horse, use her hoofs in combat. But of this old 
mother instinct only the rudiments are left. 

To the dairy cow of today, the birth of a calf 
is an incident rather than an event. She seems to 
reason that it will be well taken care of anyway 
without any particular attention on her part. On 



CONCERNING THE COW HERSELF 17 

the whole, she obeys certain instincts, but obeys 
them feebly. If at pasture, she will commonly 
choose an isolated or partially concealed spot 
where her calf will be born, but she is likely to be 
surprisingly careless about it afterwards. I have 
seen more than one cow so lost to the sense of duty 
that she absolutely refused to grant her offspring 
its first meal. However, the manifestation of 
mother-love varies greatly in different individuals. 
There are some cows, who are, to use a barn phrase, 
"crazy for their calf," but this is the exceptional 
animal. Many cows trouble themselves very little 
about it. The idea of a cow mourning for her calf 
like "Rachel weeping for her children and will not 
be comforted because they are not," is a pretty bit 
of fiction which is hardly borne out by the facts. 
In most cases, the cow, given her choice between 
her calf and a feed of silage, will basely take the 
silage. 

There is one strange bovine habit, however, that 
at least gives ground for surmises. Many, per- 
haps most cows, will, on the birth of a calf, devour 
the fetal membranes, a procedure surely utterly 
at variance with her usual ideas of diet. There is 
really no rational explanation for this most as- 
tonishing practice unless we assume that the prim- 
itive cow did this in order that it might not at- 
tract the beast of prey and so reveal the location 
of her calf. If so, does the mother cow, standing 
at ease and safety in a box-stall, respond to some 



18 THE COW 

dim hereditary memory of what her own ancestor 
did a thousand and more generations before? Or, 
may modern science find that this unusual diet 
supplies some need of the bovine body at this par- 
ticular moment? 

It seems to me that the young calf exhibits more 
of the primal instincts of the wild than does the 
mother. Under native conditions, it must have 
been some days after birth before it began to run 
by its mother's side with the remainder of the herd, 
and during this period if there was any one idea 
that was firmly stamped into its little bovine brain, 
it must have been never, never to betray its pres- 
ence by movement or voice. So in obedience to 
this training, the baby calf will lie quietly for a 
very long period unless aroused by its mother. I 
do not know how long the calf would remain quiet 
and I certainly have never had the heart to try. It 
will often lie for twenty-four hours and probably 
much longer. I doubt not that the youngster gets 
very hungry and possibly lonely, but it does not 
forget its hereditary training. Stoical philosopher 
that it is, it curls up, pokes its soft little nose into 
its furry flank and tries to sleep the hours away 
until mother shall come and give the glad signal 
that everything is well. 

Very frequently I have gone to give the young- 
ster its first lesson in drinking, and have found 
him so sleepy and suspicious of my well-meant at- 
tentions that I could not arouse any interest in 



CONCERNING THE COW HERSELF 19 

getting his first meal out of a tin pail, yet the com- 
ing of the mother with just a low mother-call or a 
caressing touch of her tongue would almost in- 
stantly find the calf alert and ready for a meal 
from her udder. The lamb seems to look out on 
this cold world with different vision, and if long 
neglected by its mother announces the fact to 
everybody by piteous baby cries or bleating. 

It seems remarkable that the new-born calf con- 
trives to nurse as quickly as it does. Usually 
within an hour or two after birth, with wide un- 
seeing eyes and wobbly uncertain footsteps, he 
staggers against his mother and promptly finds his 
way to her full udder. Of course, under modem 
dairy conditions, the calf is allowed to nurse in 
nature's way for only a day or two at longest and 
then is suddenly and rudely snatched from the 
maternal fount forever and compelled to take his 
meals out of a bucket supplied by a man in over- 
alls. The greatest wonder is how rapidly he man- 
ages to accommodate himself to changed condi- 
tions. For untold generations the calf has learned 
to look up and search when it is hungry. We com- 
pel him to do the diametrically opposite thing, to 
look down and drink with its nose at the level of 
its feet. No wonder we think it stupid and some- 
times lose our temper, yet generally from three 
to six tactful lessons will suffice to establish the 
new habit. It is commonly said that the calves of 
our special dairy breeds learn to drink more 



30 THE COW 

readily than the beef breeds, which is what we 
would expect, for the former have been accus- 
tomed to this mode of infantile feeding for many 
generations. 

The dairy cow today is so completely a creature 
of artificial environment and acquired habits that 
we can only guess how the calf and its mother 
fared in the old days. Doubtless she nourished 
him and guided him and, if necessary, fought for 
him the first summer, and by autumn he was a 
lusty thick-haired youngster. Then as the time 
of her next calf drew near, her udder ceased to 
yield anything to him. Her mind was filled with 
plans for the new baby, and he straightway thank- 
lessly forgot her and drifted away to frolic or 
strive with his kind. On the modern dairy farm, 
the calf's ideal of a mother is typified by a herds- 
man with a bucket of skim-milk, while the material 
affections and instincts of the cow go out to a 
man with a tin pail and a three-legged milking 
stool; and that is why family ties grow lax in the 
dairy world. 

Both historical evidence and climatic adapta- 
bility point to the fact that the cow is a native of 
temperate or cold regions. She is apparently not 
at home in the tropics, and even in our South At- 
lantic states she tends to diminish in size and vigor, 
although this is possibly due to defi.cient food 
supply and the scourge of the Texas cattle tick 
rather than mere questions of temperature. With 



CONCEKNING THE COW HEESELF 21 

winter protection she does remarkably well in very 
severe climates, and the well-fed steer thrives and 
enjoys himself in the open in temperatures below 
zero. It has been noted, however, that, unlike 
sheep, cattle do not dig or paw away the snow to 
get at the grass beneath, and this would indicate 
that the cradle of the race was not habitually snow- 
covered in the winter. On the other hand, like 
deer, the cow readily browses the young twigs of 
trees when grass is scanty. 

We can only guess concerning the history of her 
domestication. There was surely a time when she 
roamed the woodlands and knew not the restraint 
or the protection of the hand of man. The cave- 
man snared or trapped her and gorged himself on 
her abundant flesh, and with a sharp stone stripped 
off her skin and shaped it into a rude covering 
against the cold. The human slowly and labori- 
ously struggled up toward fore-thought, thrift and 
civilization, and one day a wise old savage and 
philosopher of the tribe made an infinite advance 
when he said, "Would it not be better to capture 
and tame some of these fine beasts and from them 
rear others in order that we may have them al- 
ways at hand for food and skins instead of depend- 
ing on the uncertain chances of the chase?" and 
that day the first Animal Husbandman arose. 

And another time some great thinker of the clan 
observed that some of his increasing herd served 
his purpose better than others because of size or 



22 THE COW 

vigor or perhaps because of color markings that he 
fancied, and he reasoned, "May I not kill the calves 
of the cows that please me least and preserve the 
calves of those that I like best and thus improve 
them all?" and that day the first Breeder stood 
forth and systematic improvement was begun. 
And then again, when the mother of a tiny human 
babe had died — killed perhaps in a savage foray 
by a neighboring clan — the bereaved father in his 
helplessness and tenderness bethought himself of 
drawing milk from a female of his herd and thus 
preserving the life of his child, and that resource- 
ful father became the first Daiiyman. Advances of 
this kind once made were never lost. 

There is every reason to think that the genus 
Bos readily yields itself to domestication. We 
must remember that domestication means far more 
than mere training. The animals of a menagerie 
may be tamed and look to man for food and may 
be taught certain habits and tricks, but they can 
hardly be called domesticated. The real test of 
domestication is the free rei^roduction of young 
under the changed conditions, and few animals 
when kept under artificial confinement will meet 
this test. Not only this, but the way in which 
oxen are readily broken as beasts of burden show 
how completely their impulses have become sub- 
servient to the will of man. 

In any case, the written history of the cow is 
very short as compared with her unknown past. 



CONCERNING THE COW HERSELF 23 

The story of her domestication, if we knew it, 
would be that of the race. The tale of her con- 
quest begins when man first emerged from a wan- 
dering hunter into a pastoralist and began to build 
circular or mud huts beside the water-courses. 
Before recorded history, the domesticated cow ex- 
isted, and the earliest books of the Old Testament 
— those that speak to us concerning the child his- 
tory of the race— ^are musical with the bleating of 
sheep and the lowing of cattle and the tinkling of 
the bells of the camels. The domestication of ani- 
mals and man's struggle out of savagery went on 
side by side, because only after he had acquired 
beasts of burden that could draw the plow or 
move objects that were beyond his strength was 
it possible to make any progress in agriculture or 
permanent architecture. 

The observant farmer-naturalist of the future 
will have new problems to challenge him, if he lives 
in warm-temperate and hot countries, because of 
the introduction of a very different strain of blood 
in recent years. This strain is the zebu or Bos 
indicus, the sacred cow of India. The zebu is intro- 
duced with the hope that crosses with common 
cattle will better adapt the animals to warm cli- 
mates and diseases. One sometimes sees the marks 
of such crosses in the lighter color, lopping ears, 
heavy hanging dewlaps, recurving horns, hump 
over the shoulders, and the very different eyes. 
What permanent effect these introductions will 



24 THE COW 

have we do not yet know; and what traits of 
ancient ancestry may come from the oriental coun- 
tries will be an interesting observation for future 
generations to make. 

When some day a great artist shall worthily 
idealize on canvas the epic story of the American 
pioneer as he lays the foundations of civilization 
in the wilderness, his trusty animal co-laborers and 
messengers in the task will be pictured not as pranc- 
ing steeds, champing the bit with distended nostril 
and flashing eye — such as Ulysses had at the siege 
of Troy — but they will be great beasts with placid 
eyes and mighty shoulders and heaving flank and 
wide-spreading horns, the glorious ox-team. 

A drowsy cow beside the bars again 
Patiently waiting for the herdsman's call 
With dim and far-off memories in her brain, — 
What would she say if she could tell them aU ? 

Comes to her visions of an ancient past 
Before man's yoke upon her neck was laid 
When thundering down aisles of forests vast 
She made one of a sweeping cavalcade? 

Can she feel honor that she holds such place 
In the world's need that unto her it clings ? 
The burden bearer of the human race. 
The foster mother of its proudest kings. 

The twilight comes — fades from the sky the light, 
Low in the west the star of evening swings 
And couched in fragrant pastures through the night, — 
I wonder if she muses on these things? 



Ill 

THE SIMILITUDE OF THE COW 

Some years ago one of the educational institu- 
tions, in furthering its nature-study work, asked 
the school children to draw an outline picture of a 
cow. One pupil in New York City sent in a sketch 
— certainly original — showing a cow with udder 
extending from the hind legs to the forelegs, I 
suppose the youngster had taken the pattern from 
the good old text-book picture of Romulus and 
Remus suckled by the she-wolf; but the child had 
never known a cow, perhaps had never seen one. 
His experience of country things was much like 
that of another pupil in the same city who thought 
clover was part of a box because a certain article 
of food had come into his home in a container with 
a clover-leaf brand. We who live in the open fields 
little realize what crude mental pictures of animals 
and plants lie in the minds of thousands of our 
people. 

Note the cow lying down. Her fore feet fold 
back under the body ; her hind feet project forward 
but are not covered; her body is not flat on the 
ground, but tilted over to one side, the hind quar- 

25 



S6 THE COW 

ters lower and flatter, the front quarters usually 
more erect, the head generally elevated above the 
line of the shoulders, with variations as noted in 
Chapter IV. 

When she gets up she lifts her forequarters on 
the elbows, then places her hind feet on the ground 
and elevates the rear quarters, then brings up the 
fore parts to full stature. She stretches herself 
taut, lowering her head in the process, whisks her 
tail to one side, and is ready for any new event. 
The horse arises by getting up directly on his front 
hoofs, then raising the hind quarters. 

Once before you, the cow is a ponderous bulky 
beast, the very mass of her — if she is of the big 
breeds — striking fear into the minds of the timid 
as they see her rise. She seems to shake the 
ground. The huge bulk conveys an impression of 
angularity, — a massive rectangle with projecting 
prominences at the hips and above the front legs, 
thick neck supporting an elongated head carried, 
when in resting position, in an upward direction. 
The front legs stand straight and post-like under 
the weight of front body and head, about equal in 
length to the vertical width of the carcass ; but the 
feet stand obliquely downward and forward from 
the legs, bearing the weight by strength of liga- 
ments rather than by direct impact, making the 
support to look indirect and insecure. The hind 
legs do not have the post-like effect. They are 
placed well toward the end of the rectangle; the 



THE SIMILITUDE OF THE COW 27 

bones present a series of angles, and the hock or 
joint points backward; the feet are set obliquely, 
as in front. But while the support appears to be 
insecure — an appearance that is much accentuated 
when the skeleton is in view — the series of angles 
and indirections provide for movement in all direc- 
tions and great elasticity of stride. The hoofs are 
two-parted, carrying forward the line of the lower 
leg and fetlock, and make the characteristic double 
footprint. The tail hangs straight from the top of 
the hip, continuing the extension of the backbone, 
with the fly-brush comprising the lower half; it is 
well provided with muscles and is capable of mak- 
ing a quick and powerful sweep. 

In general, the back presents a straight line 
from hip to shoulder, often with a downward curva- 
ture; the line rises slightly over the shoulders, and 
then takes a downward and upward curve to the 
poll of the head. The lower line of the body pre- 
sents a graceful upward curve at the rear, disclos- 
ing the udder; thence there is nearly a straight 
course to the front legs; and beyond and be- 
tween the legs extends the brisket, like the prow 
of a ship, following upward into the folds of 
the soft dewlap that depends from the neck. 
The most graceful part of the animal is the 
upper neck, attractive in conformation, flexible, 
soft and pleasant to the feel; it is about the neck 
that one wants to throw the arm, for a cow re- 
sponds to affection. 



38 THE COW 

The cow and the horse have different methods 
of accomplishing the same end. The horse must 
not be allowed to fill himself with water after a 
long hot day in the fields lest he get indigestion, 
but the over-heated ox refuses water until cooled 
off. 

Both animals have specially adapted organs for 
grazing but quite unlike. The cow has thick and 
relatively immovable lips, but she has a tongue 
which she can protrude far out of her mouth and 
she uses this as a sort of sweeping organ to grasp 
and gather the grass and pull it into her mouth. 
She can use it as skillfully and daintily as an 
elephant uses his trunk. The tongue of the horse 
has no special adaptability in this regard but he 
is furnished with a prehensile upper lip that is a 
marvel of sensitiveness and delicacy and that per- 
mits him to pick up and bring to the mouth single 
kernels of grain in a way that seems almost in- 
credible. Cows have front teeth on the lower jaw 
only with a tough cartilagenous pad above; in 
grazing their food is torn or pulled off rather than 
bitten off. The cow does this by seizing the grass 
and then pulling it off by a forward motion of the 
head, that is, she "eats away from her self," while 
the horse grazes by a backward pull — eats "toward 
himself." 

Cattle eat rapidly and swallow the food with 
little chewing, relying mainly on subsequent mas- 
tication. As soon as she is satisfactorily filled and 



THE SIMILITUDE OF THE COW 29 

can find time for solid comfort and contemplation, 
the cow regurgitates the food and each bolus or 
"cud" is thoroughly rechewed and ground, several 
hours of each day being given up to this (for her) 
very pleasant task. Each "cud" is commonly given 
from fifty to seventy strokes of the teeth before it is 
swallowed and replaced by a new portion. Calves 
chew more rapidly than older animals. The cow 
that is seriously sick ceases to ruminate and if she 
again "finds her cud" it is joyfully hailed by her 
owner as an evidence of returning health. An in- 
teresting comment on how late ignorance and su- 
perstition linger among us is the fact that a genera- 
tion ago many cow-keepers believed that the cud 
was a definite something — a sort of personal pos- 
session belonging to a cow and that if she was so 
unfortunate as to "lose" it she must have some spe- 
cial help to replace it. Many weird combinations — 
a hunk of fat, salt pork being one of the most ap- 
proved — were forced down the throat of sick cows 
in a well meant effort to supply this particular 
need. Not only "loss of cud" but "wolf-in-the-tail" 
and "hollow-horn" were classic ailments of the old- 
time quack cow doctor. For "hollow-horn" he 
bored a hole in the horn with a gimlet and poured 
in turpentine. If the miserable cow died, he cut 
off her horn for the satisfaction of the owner and, 
lo, it was hollow! an incontestible proof of the 
correctness of his diagnosis. This may sound like 
fanciful invention or a tale of the Dark Ages, but 



30 THE COW 

it was established veterinary procedure within the 
memory of living men. 

The normal udder of the cow has four teats as 
compared with two teats in the mare and sheep 
and twelve to sixteen in the sow. However, it is 
not at all uncommon to find two smaller additional 
or supernumerary teats and these have frequently 
been regarded as an evidence of special dairy excel- 
lence, but they detract from the appearance of the 
udder and many breeders make it a rule to cut 
them off as soon as noted in the calf. 

Twins among cattle are exceedingly rare. 
Within the memory of the writer there have been 
more than a thousand calves born on Hillside 
Farm, and among all these only one pair of twins ; 
but probably twins are rather more usual than 
would be indicated by this particular experience. 
When one twin isi a bull and the other a heifer, the 
latter is called a "free-martin" and there is a very 
old and persitent notion that she will prove barren. 
This is not what we would expect if reasoning from 
analogy, but the idea is widely accepted and two 
trustworthy men have assured me they have tried 
it out and that the popular belief is correct. Twins 
among horses are the rarest possible occurrence 
and horsemen aver that they never survive. On the 
other hand, among sheep, especially some breeds, 
twins are the rule rather than the exception while 
triplets are not rare. Piggies come into the world 
all the way from one up to twenty or more, and 



THE SIMILITUDE OF THE COW 31 

wise old mothers often manage to raise in excess 
of a dozen. 

It is a surprising fact that while so far as we 
know the wild cow was homed and the whole genus 
(Bos) bears horns, yet we have long had well de- 
fined races of hornless or polled cattle. The truth 
seems to be that hornless sports ("mooleys" in the 
farm vernacular) appear from time to time among 
all breeds and these show a strong tendency to 
reproduce the same condition in their offspring. 
The establishment within a few years of a herd- 
book for Polled Jerseys and also for Polled 
Durhams or Shorthorns indicates that it is not 
especially difficult to fix this variation when it 
appears. The prepotency of the polled breeds is 
very strong and the offspring of the first cross with 
horned breeds will be hornless in most cases. 

From the standpoint of the dairyman the pres- 
ence of horns is an unmitigated nuisance, so much 
so that the dehorning of cows has become a very 
common custom. The animal is fastened securely 
and the horns removed with a thin small-toothed 
stiff -backed saw, taking care to make the cut close 
enough to take a little circle of skin with it in 
order that there may be no further growth of the 
stub. The horn is hollow, and the operation is not 
so laborious as it sounds. This method makes a 
less serious wound than that caused by the use of 
the clippers. Doubtless it is a very painful opera- 
tion, but it is kindness in the end and our New 



33 THE COW 

York law specifically declares that it is not cruelty 
to animals within the meaning of the statute. De- 
horned cattle, either milch cows or steers, herd 
together much more closely, and it practically does 
away with the danger of injury to the udder from 
hooking, an ever-present source of loss in the 
homed herd. Hornless animals may also be se- 
cured by applying a little caustic potash to the 
embryonic "horn button" of the three-day-old calf. 
Of course the logical plan would be to use hornless 
breeds and this is easy among beef cattle because 
there are already three well-known polled breeds, 
but unfortunately all our most highly developed 
dairy types are homed. 

In size the cow ranges all the way from the 
little Kerry cattle of Ireland, which are the pig- 
mies of the race, up to the great Shorthorns which 
are probably a little the largest of the breeds. The 
Kerry cow Red Rose was a famous prize winner of 
the breed but she is said to have stood only 38 
inches tall at the withers. Some mature Kerry 
bulls have weighed only 400 pounds as compared 
with weights of 2500 to 2600 pounds — not at all 
uncommon in fat show bulls and steers of the beef 
breeds. Indeed there is at least the story of a 
Shorthorn ox reaching the almost incredible weight 
of 4300 pounds. The males are always much 
heavier and when mature should weigh about one- 
half more than a female of the same relative devel- 
opment. 



IV 

THE COW, MENTALLY AND 
INSTINCTIVELY 

I HAVE been endeavoring to write a description 
of the cow — trying to see her in the same way that 
John Burroughs saw the robin or chipmunk or rab- 
bit or woodchuck in his forest walks, or as Thoreau 
watched the wild life that strove or gamboled at 
the door of his lodge on Walden Pond. I must say 
that I do not think the cow lends herself to the 
same sort of treatment or, at any rate, the task is 
different and more diflflcult. All the native fauna 
of our fields and woods has been living under the 
same set of conditions for uncounted generations. 
An unchanging environment has tended to iron 
out all differentiation and variation. The present 
form, size, protective coloration, food and shelter 
habits, every biological character of the wild life 
of our farms represents an adaptation, presum- 
ably a very perfect adaptation, to the conditions 
under which they must live. Thus there has re- 
sulted for each species a very firmly fixed and al- 
most unvarying standardization of type. Any 
marked deviation or mutation from this type would 

33 



34 THE COW 

be disadvantageous and hence would tend to be 
extinguished. So in wild life our differences are 
those of age and sex and season, but, eliminating 
these, almost any chipmunk might sit for the por- 
trait of his race. 

As soon, however, as we turn to domestic ani- 
mals we find an entirely opposite condition. The 
cow for thousands of years has been under the 
control of man. With him she has crossed the 
seas to new conditions and strange environments. 
Because the conditions of life that surround her 
have altered, she has changed herself to fit them. 
This tendency toward mutation has been greatly 
intensified by the conscious selection of man, and 
many unusual variations that in her native wood- 
lands would have been extinguished have been 
encouraged under the hand of man, preserved, and 
perpetuated. Thus, from being once almost im- 
mutable, she has become, together with the dog 
and domestic fowl, the most uncertain and varied 
of animal forms. The ornithologist describes our 
native birds with most painstaking care and 
minute accuracy and, at the expense of infinite time 
and patience, makes colored plates of their plum- 
age and markings. What would he do, however, 
if asked to describe a hen and then taken to the 
poultry show to gather subject matter? How is it 
possible, therefore, to describe the color of a cow 
when she wears almost every conceivable shade 
except the blues and greens and every possible 



THE COW, MENTALLY 35 

pattern or irregularity of color markings? Or 
what shall we say of her horns when they may be 
wide-spreading and very large or small and 
"crumpled," when they may be black-tipped or 
ivory white or yet the color of amber, or not in- 
frequently they may be entirely absent? What is 
the trick of language that may enable the dweller 
on Mars to vizualize her? Plainly the cow cannot 
be described in the few terse, zoological, almost 
mathematical phrases that might picture the rac- 
coon. At best we must describe her as a type 
rather than a sharply cut species. 

The most interesting traits of the cow are not 
physical but mental. Every farm boy who has 
lived with her and driven her from pasture and 
milked her and taught the calf to drink knows 
that she has a rather definite psychology. 

I think I can uphold the contention that most 
animals under domestication (the horse and dog 
being exceptions) are mentally degenerating as 
compared with their wild forebears. Even 
civilized man has degenerated in some respects, or 
perhaps a kindlier statement would be that some 
powers which he once possessed have been allowed 
to fall into disuse. Stewart Edward White writes 
that he has seen the Indian of the Canadian wilds 
stoop and smell the footprint of a moose and then 
promptly announce whether it was made within 
an hour or a day — a performance inconceivable to 
the civilized white man. Doubtless, we are not as 



36 THE COW 

keen of scent or as fleet of foot, nor can we climb 
trees or resist cold as did our savage ancestors, 
but in place of these powers we have gained other 
attributes that are infinitely more worth while. 

During the centunes the cow has left behind 
many habits and her instincts grow progressively 
more feeble. Once she had to live by her wits, to 
avoid and, if necessary, to fight off her enemies and 
to search for a food supply which was often scanty 
and always uncertain, but under the care of man 
she has become the most pampered of animals. 
Our modern idea of dairy conditions is that the 
cow shall never be allowed to be hungry or thirsty 
or cold. She is waited on with the most as- 
siduous attention, for the owner knows that dis- 
comfort on her part will immediately be reflected 
in a decreased milk-flow. Thus her special senses 
are slowly dying, but two functions have at the 
same time been abnormally developed, her udder 
and her digestive apparatus. Holstein cows have 
given nearly thirty times their own weight of milk 
in a year — a marvelous performance made pos- 
sible only by the fact that along with this abnormal 
development of the mammary glands there has 
been an equally remarkable development of the 
digestive function. The ideal dairy cow tends to 
approach the status of the queen bee, in which all 
the ordinary habits and instincts of the bee have 
been made subservient to an almost helpless or- 
ganism that must be fed great quantities of pre- 



THE COW, MENTALLY 37 

pared food in order that she may lay 3000 eggs a 
day. 

Intellectually and morally, a very good case can- 
not be made out for the cow. Her standards of 
ethics and honor are low. In her conduct toward 
the other members of the herd she is both cruel and 
cowardly. Cattle by nature are polygamous, rov- 
ing in herds with an old bull at the head who holds 
his place against all comers by ordeal of combat. 
Therefore, the instinct to fight is very strong 
among bulls. If a number of young bulls run in 
pasture together, they seem to settle satisfactorily 
the question of precedence and get along very well, 
but strange bulls fight on first introduction until 
it is definitely settled who is victor. These com- 
bats are sometimes rather spectacular with much 
pushing and scuffling but apparently with very 
little real injury to either party. This combative- 
ness seems to crop out in the cows as a sort of 
secondary sexual character, and every herd of any 
size will always have some hooking and fighting 
going on, resulting sometimes in serious injury 
to the udder. The cow shows herself a mean 
coward, because frequently, if one cow is fast in 
the stanchion and hence unable to defend herself, 
another not yet fastened will pitch in and gore 
her most unmercifully until she bellows with pain 
and terror. So also many cows standing in their 
stalls with a fellow on each side will strike with 
their horns first on one side and then on the other 



38 THE COW 

in an effort to prevent their stall-mates getting any- 
thing to eat. 

However, cow life is not quite all eating and 
fighting. Cows greatly enjoy licking all parts of 
the body that they can reach, this probably being 
the bovine ideal of a careful toilet. It is rather 
amusing to see another cow veiy carefully bestow- 
ing this attention on the head and face of a neigh- 
bor who, of course, cannot reach them with her own. 
tongue. It is hard to decide whether the giver or 
the recipient derives most pleasure from this ser- 
vice. 

The thrilling moment in the life of a cow is that 
wonderful day in late May wiien, after a long win- 
ter of confinement in the barn, she is again "turned 
out" to the pasture. That gala day stirs up all her 
old instincts and hereditary memories. Playful- 
ness except in the calf is rare among cattle, but 
in the first hours at pasture the whole herd will 
often indulge in a wild rush, circling the field with 
tails carried erect, high over the back like banners 
and with strange awkward cavorting and galloping 
— for all the world like the rush of a lot of young- 
sters let out of school. The most ardent admirer — 
or apologist — for the cow can hardly claim for her 
grace of movement. Well fed and thrifty calves, 
during the first weeks of life, enjoy giving vent to 
their high spirits in much galloping in circles with 
clumsy kicking up of the heels, frequently accom- 
panying such gymnastics with resounding calfish 



THE COW, MENTALLY 39 

"br-a-a-a-ah." The adult indulges in such foolish- 
ness only on very special occasions, and the first 
day at pasture is one of these. When hard driven 
by a dog or anxious to rejoin the herd from which 
she has been separated, the cow is capable of a 
straightforward running gait that very easily out- 
strips a man, and will even rival a good horse, but 
the cow merely disporting herself has a particu- 
larly grotesque, plunging, wobbling gallop. 

The herd on the first day at pasture eats very 
little for the first two or three hours. Rather it 
is an occasion for exploration and perhaps for 
surprise and annoyance that her domain is now 
so narrow, for she once roamed over many leagues 
instead of being limited by a fence-line inclosing 
only a score or two of acres. Life for a cow at 
pasture is made up of periods of grazing alter- 
nated with intervals when she lies at ease to pursue 
the pleasant task of chewing the cud while diges- 
tion prepares her stomach for another fill. As a 
rule, the resting cow assumes the attitude of lying 
squarely on the brisket and elbows (knees, in the 
incorrect speech of the farm) with the hind legs 
drawn up under her while she rests on one hip or 
the other, but occasionally she varies this position 
by stretching out at full length as if she were dead, 
even the head lying on the ground. This rather 
unusual position is more common with young 
heifers or calves. If pasture is abundant a very 
few hours a day suffice to gather her food, but 



40 THE COW 

when scanty she must industriously pick all day 
for a living and even then is not fully fed, as the 
milk pail only too plainly attests. The real ro- 
mance for the cow as well as her owner lies in those 
first golden weeks of early summer. 

The gregarious instinct in cows is strong, and 
they tend to feed in a fairly compact herd. As you 
come near them you can see the long almost pre- 
hensile tongues gathering and sweeping the grass 
into the grasp of the jaws, and you can hear the 
gentle tearing sound as it is pulled rather than 
bitten off. An hour or two later the cows will be 
lying down, often closely bunched together, and 
in hot weather they are wise enough to choose the 
shady borders of the wood. They enjoy water in 
summer, and will often stand leg deep in bright 
running streams or ford considerable rivers. They 
do not, however, have the habit of wallowing in 
the mud after the manner of their close relative, 
the buffalo. 

Unquestionably, there is a sort of mass-psychol- 
ogy in a herd which leads them all to do the same 
thing at about the same time. The farm boy who 
has always "brought" the cows as a part of his 
boyhood tasks well knows that if a part of the herd 
thinks it is about time to move toward the bars, 
all of them will prove to be of the same mind. Yet 
this same farm boy also knows that an occasional 
cow is a very poor mixer and will commonly be 



THE COW, MENTALLY 41 

feeding in a far corner by herself when the re- 
mainder of the herd has decided to go and see 
whether it is milking time. As a whole, however, 
the order of feeding and resting and traveling 
seems to rise from a common impulse. 

In one phase of pasture life, however, the cow 
attains a sort of impressive dignity and that is 
when she is definitely "on the march." It is fine 
to see a large herd of cows who have suddenly de- 
termined to make a pilgrimage — it may be merely 
to go for a drink or to explore a distant part of 
the pasture. / There they go, largely strung out in 
single file, heads up, looking neither to the right 
nor left, no foolishness, no distractions of eating or 
casual fighting allowed, but every matron stepping 
briskly off as if under orders. I feel sorry for 
them. It seems like a pitiful effort to rehearse 
within the limits of a pasture field the old-time 
long marches in search of far-off feeding grounds. 
Truly man has come to have dominion over her. 
To me the most interesting and impressive thing 
about the cow is this : that she still remains a sure 
foundation for biological musings and a riddle in 
atavism. Written history is short, but her story 
is very long. She is an ancient of the earth, and 
her career is linked with the forgotten men of the 
Old Stone Age who pictured her in rude outlines 
scratched upon the walls of their cavern homes. 
Her minor characteristics, her size, color, con- 



42 THE COW 

formation and function have been modified almost 
beyond belief. Her very instincts no longer profit 
her, yet she still responds and acts on the sugges- 
tions of dim far-off hereditary memories. 



CONCERNING COW-PASTURES AND COW- 
PATHS 

The first dairyman was wholly a pastoralist. He 
proved himself a wise farm-manager and a skillful 
feeder when he led his herd where the pastures 
were richest, and after thirty centuries the Hebrew 
idyl, "He maketh me to lie down in green pas- 
tures, He leadeth me beside the still waters," re- 
mains the world's most beautiful symbol of ten- 
der and loving care. 

The quest of pasture has been one of the primi- 
tive forces that have made history. Many of the 
great early migrations, which have forced whole 
peoples across deserts, over mountains and into 
new valleys and strange lands, have been the re- 
sult not so much of the lust of power and the 
glory of empire as the insistent necessity for new 
pasture grounds. , The thirteenth chapter of 
Genesis is not only an excellent sermon on the 
settlement of family quarrels, but it is also an 
illuminating treatise on the early pasturage situa- 
tion in Palestine. "Lot also, which went with 
Abram, had flocks, and herds, and tents. And the 

43 



44 THE COW 

land was not able to bear them, that they might 
dwell together: for their substance was great, so 
that they could not dwell together. And there 
was a strife between the herdmen of Abram's 
cattle and the herdmen of Lot's cattle. And 
Abram said unto Lot, Let there be no strife, I 
pray thee, between me and thee, and between my 
herdmen and thy herdmen; for we be brethren. 
Is not the whole land before thee? Separate thy- 
self, I pray thee, from me: if thou wilt take the 
left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou 
depart to the right hand, then I will go to the 
left. And Lot lifted up his eyes, and, beheld all 
the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered every- 
where. Then Lot chose him all the plain of Jordan ; 
and Lot journeyed east : and they separated them- 
selves the one from the other." Thus briefly did the 
Chronicler set down the story of an ancient quar- 
rel and its wise settlement, and that same story 
has been repeated in every countiy and age until 
now, and nowhere more bitterly and insistently 
than in these very years in the range country of our 
own western states. 

Pasturage surely represents the first beginnings 
of agriculture. Doubtless herds grew to large 
numbers and wandered widely before any man be- 
gan to set up landmarks and boundaries and to 
claim a certain portion of the earth's surface for 
himself and for his heirs and assigns forever. 
Only when one man's pasture range began to en- 



COW-PASTUEES AND COW-PATHS 45 

croach on another's did he do this but once hav- 
ing set up his claim he must needs defend it with 
his life if necessary, and so all our land titles rest 
originally on force or fraud, never on equity. It 
was a far cry from the time when men merely 
herded their animals until they began to till the 
ground on any considerable and systematic scale. 
In the days when animal-keeping merely supple- 
mented hunting and root-digging, there were no 
large fields and no rotation of crops and no regu- 
lar sowing and reaping. This at least seems to 
have been the rule among all Old-World peoples. 
The American Indians, on the contrary, among the 
most advanced tribes grew considerable areas of 
corn and beans and even planted orchards, but save 
for their dogs seem to have been without domesti- 
cated animals. The probable explanation is that 
almost all the animals of our farms today are of 
Asiatic or European origin and in all North 
America, with the exception of the bison, there 
would seem to have been no large easily domesti- 
cated grazing mammal. 

Unquestionably the first cow-keeper relied solely 
on pasture, and only after considerable advance- 
ment did he develop foresight enough to provide 
stores of food against times of scarcity, such as 
drought in summer or snowbound winter months. 
It must be confessed that some cattle ranchers in 
our own western states have hardly gotten beyond 
this same primitive practice, and every year their 



46 THE COW 

cruel and careless methods allow cattle to perish 
from starvation and exposure. In exceptionally 
severe winters the loss has been appalling both 
from a financial standpoint and from the animal 
suffering involved. As a matter of fact, all our 
farm animals exhibit extraordinaiy ability to with- 
stand — or more correctly to live through — hard 
conditions. It was long a fireside tradition of the 
Susquehanna Valley that when the Cherry Valley 
massacre took place in the autumn of 1778, involv- 
ing the captivity or murder of most of the settlers 
and the extinction of the community, some horses 
wandered off into the woods and one of them at 
least was not reclaimed until three years later, 
having somehow survived all the vicissitudes and 
rigors of the winters of the central New York 
plateau. It is certain that a race of hard ponies, 
descendants of horses, shipwrecked there long ago, 
can thrive perfectly on the coastal islands of tide- 
water Virginia. 

There are still many parts of the world, includ- 
ing our own western range country, where prac- 
tically all animal industry depends on pasture — a 
type of agriculture which is primitive and inefQ- 
cient and must eventually give way to a wiser and 
more careful husbandry. This system can survive 
only on lands that are very cheap and abundant or 
else so steep, rocky, or unproductive as to forbid 
regular rotation and the use of the plow. 

Viewed in the light of present-day methods, our 



COW-PASTURES AND COW-PATHS 47 

dairy ideas of a half century ago were certainly 
queer to say the least. Practically all dairy prod- 
ucts were made from grass in summer, and the 
barn was frankly regarded as a sort of cold-storage 
proposition for the purpose of keeping cows alive 
until summer came again and green grass in the 
fields should enable them to give milk. Of course, 
there were even then occasional dairymen — men 
in advance of their time — who were wise and 
liberal feeders, but as a whole they seem to have 
had grave doubts that a cow could really yield 
milk when there was snow on the ground. Under 
this idea there were long months when men had a 
barn full of cows but no milk, and a generation 
ago one still spoke of a "coffee cow," meaning 
thereby a cow kept "farrow" and fed with unusual 
care in order that she might supply a scant ration 
of milk for this dairyman's family during the win- 
ter months. All this was a part of the old era 
when barns were frigid and windy structures, 
stables cheerless dungeons and when there were no 
silos and grain was deemed too valuable to be fed 
to cows. She was expected to receive somewhat 
less than a maintenance ration of corn-stalks and 
over-ripe hay and to become progressively more 
lean and hungry as the slow winter dragged itself 
along. She was expected to be "spring poor," and 
no one regarded it as either a joke or a reproach 
to her owner. This is no exaggeration of what 
might be called typical dairying within the mem- 



48 THE COW 

ory of many living men. Yet, with the coming of 
May and balmy days and springing grass, these 
game cows gave birth to their calves and under the 
very favorable conditions of pasture won back 
flesh and strength and vitality sufficient to carry 
them through another winter and incidentally to 
give considerable milk and brought to their owners 
what in that day was deemed substantial dairy 
prosperity. Had those cows been human instead of 
bovine they might, when filled with grass and a 
great content in the golden month of June, have 
moralized in the words which Shakespeare puts in 
the mouth of Gloster, "Now is the winter of our 
discontent made glorious summer." 

From those bad old times the science of cow- 
keeping has changed so radically that the best 
daiiymen have come to make milk in winter rather 
than summer. Warm and sunny stables, comfort- 
able stalls, silage, early cut hay and liberal grain 
rations have made the cow and her owner inde- 
pendent of weather conditions. So far as milk 
production is concerned, June is hardly more fav- 
orable than December. Indeed, in the making of 
Advanced Registry records, where the aim is to 
force a cow to the last possible ounce of her milk 
yield, it is generally agreed that the winter is the 
most favorable season of the year. So also we feel 
sure that the well-cared-for cow that "comes fresh" 
in October will yield more milk in the next twelve 
months than if she calved in April. 



COW-PASTUKES AND COW-PATHS 49 

All this does not contradict the fact that even 
under modern conditions, pasture is still of prime 
importance in dairying. There are now, and in- 
creasingly will be, men located on very valuable 
land which is level, fertile, and easily tilled, who 
will feel that they cannot afford to pasture it, but 
will depend instead on soiling crops grown under 
conditions of intensive culture. In some cases this 
will be good farming and sound management, but 
on the whole, our dairying still rests on a basis 
of pasturage. 

It is not a foolish boast, — it is a fact that New 
York state is the real Kingdom of the Cow. 
Among the states of the Union it stands only 
seventeenth in available acreage, but it ranks first ^ 
in the value of its dairy products. Up in the 
North Country of New York the fields are fairly 
level, but the old glaciers have made them a dump- 
ing ground for their granite debris. These bowlder- 
strewn and often poorly drained fields cover large 
areas of no possible agricultural use except for 
pasturage. St. Lawrence County has more than 
96,000 dairy cows — a striking example of how a 
people has adapted its farm scheme to the environ- 
ment. 

Down in the southeast of the state are the two 
remarkable dairy counties of Orange and Dela- 

^ New York state seems to fluctuate between first and third 
place. She probably stands first in value because so much of 
her product sells as liquid milk. 



50 THE COW 

ware where the cow has been supreme for a cen- 
tury. It is here where as nowhere else the romance 
of the old days survives. Long ago the old Orange 
County Bank printed its bank notes in golden yel- 
low to signify that butter was the source of the 
wealth and prosperity of the county. The whole 
agricultural scheme of this region rests on the fact 
that the valleys are very narrow and the hillsides 
too steep and rocky to till, yet out of these same 
hills burst springs of pure soft water, and cover- 
ing them is a carpet of small, sweet, natural 
grasses which have made them as famous in story 
as the blue-grass regions of Kentucky. Along the 
Pennsylvania line from Delaware County to the 
Chautauqua grape belt is the "Southern Tier," a 
region of river valleys with much not too fertile 
upland that more and more is coming to realize 
that it is fundamentally a land of cow-pastures. 
Indeed, when one comes to survey this great state, 
one realizes that ultimately the dairy cow will pos- 
sess the land everywhere save on Long Island, parts 
of the Hudson Valley, the beautiful cereal-growing 
Finger Lake country of the western counties, and 
the favored golden orchard section of the Ontario 
shore. Conditions of soil, topography, rainfall, 
markets and even heredity and racial stocks have 
been the determining factors which have made 
dairying the premier industry in our northeastern 
states. In a word, the cow has gone in greatest 
numbers where there were large sections of land 



COW-PASTUKES AND COW-PATHS 51 

suited for pasture but not for a more intensive 
agriculture, and any extensive scheme of dairy 
practice must recognize this fact. 

It is true that the changes and advances of re- 
cent years have made pasture of relatively less im- 
portance than of old, but nevertheless the annual 
revenue derived from these old hillside pastures 
is a vast sum. For example, the preeminent month 
of all the year for milk production is June, and the 
tremendous flood of milk which each year almost 
inundates our manufacturing facilities and de- 
moralizes our markets is produced wholly from 
pasture. Our fathers expected a cow to derive her 
entire living from the open fields from the middle 
of May until the last frosted grass of late October 
was closely bitten off. We of a wiser generation 
have com« to understand that there is only a month 
or two in the year of really good pasture. Progres- 
sive cow-keepers almost universally supplement the 
grass after July 1st with grain, or better, with 
liberal feeding of silage stored the previous Sep- 
tember or else with fresh-cut oats and peas in 
mixture or other soiling forage. 

Pasture is at once both the cheapest and most 
expensive of feeds — cheap because the cow gathers 
it herself and because we usually set a low value 
on the land where it grows, and yet expensive as 
the total nutrients to the acre of pasture are so 
small as compared with those secured from more 
intensive cropping systems. It requires an acre of 



52 THE COW 

the very best or two of fairly good pasture to feed 
a cow for the summer months and even then she 
will not be really fully fed after midsummer. On 
the other hand, it is quite usual and feasible to 
grow fifteen tons of silage corn to the acre or 
enough to furnish the main roughage requirements 
of three cows for the full feeding period of two 
hundred days when they get no food outside. 
When fields are steep and rock-strewn, we may 
still rely on a primitive pasture husbandry for a 
large part of our summer feeding, but it is a 
wasteful and extravagant method where lands are 
level, fertile and easily tilled. This does not alter 
the fact that there are veiy many farms whose 
prosperity is bound up with their pasture areas. 

If we study the question, we cannot escape the 
conclusion that the value of our great pasture re- 
sources is declining with the years. This decline 
is not rapid and perhaps it may be so slow that the 
owner fails to be really aware of it, but if he com- 
pares the carrying capacity of a pasture now with 
its ability many years ago the downward tendency 
becomes evident. As farmers we have been very 
slow to realize that permanent pastures, like all 
other lands, need fertilizers and care. We have 
been quick to agree that land which is plowed 
and sowed and harvested by a machine needs 
manuring, but there has been a widespread yet 
mistaken notion that land lying in pasture will 
improve under opposite treatment. There is abso- 



COW-PASTUEES AND COW-PATHS 53 

lutely nothing either in theory or practice to justify 
this belief. It is true that the total quantity of 
plant-food in all good soils is very gi'eat; yet it is 
not unlimited and it cannot be subtracted from 
every year for generations without some day ap- 
proaching the end of abundance. There are perma- 
nent pastures where in many cases for a century 
the cows have been carrying away evei^ything that 
grew and where there has never been any pretense 
of returning either fertility or grass-seed. The 
owner now wonders vaguely why that old hill does 
not seem to feed as many cows as it used to in 
grandfather's time. Of course, the argument is 
that while the cow takes everything off the land, 
she immediately returns her manure in liquidation 
of the debt. This line of reasoning is very faulty 
because some of this fertility is permanently lost 
to the farm and some of it is redistributed to other 
areas. Mere pasturing does not constitute soil con- 
servation. When we remember that each ton of 
milk contains, say, twelve pounds of nitrogen, four 
pounds of phosphoric acid and four pounds of 
potash, and that these old pastures have been fur- 
nishing scores of tons of milk annually for genera- 
tions, and when we add to this the much more 
serious loss due to other causes, we see that our old 
pastures present a very serious problem in soil 
depletion. 

In general, these old worn fields are to be treated 
in one of three ways. Those reasonably free of 



54 THE COW 

large stones and trees and level enough to admit 
the use of modern farm machinery ought to be 
plowed and, for a season or two at least, put into 
the regular rotation of the farm. A pasture that 
can be handled in this way does not constitute a 
real problem. 

There are other fields too valuable to abandon 
but not practicable to till. These should be helped 
out with applications of lime, acid-phosphate and 
grass-seed — never forgetting the grass-seed — ^be- 
cause pasture failure is not a question of depleted 
fertility alone, but is also due to the fact that the 
grass plants have died out and there are no new 
ones to take their place. Grass plants do not live 
forever, any more than do the trees in an orchard, 
and the only method of renewal that we know is 
scattering grass seed in early spring. Much has 
been said about this, and many kinds of seed have 
been suggested ; but we may at least remember that 
the ideal pasture is a mixture of blue-grass and 
white clover; so whatever else we do, let us not 
forget the "grass that made Kentucky famous" and 
the plant which is said to furnish two-thirds of the 
commercial honey crop of eastern North America. 

Another class of so-called pastures ought never 
to have been cleared of forests in the beginning. 
They have in them no possibilities to justify the 
expenditure of either labor or fertility, and the 
quicker Nature takes them back to her kindly pro- 
tection, the better. With them, the best policy is 



COW-PASTUKES AND COW-PATHS 55 

frank abandonment, with forestry. Perhaps a 
generation yet unborn may cut a crop of lumber 
from them two or three centuries hence. 

There are some very familiar and commonplace 
objects and scenes in whose very nature there 
inheres an indefinable charm which we cannot ex- 
plain or analyze and which yet has a very real and 
distinct value in life. To this quality we sometimes 
give the name of romance or sentiment. Doubtless 
the ability to thrill to this unexplained force varies 
in different individuals and is aroused by different 
objects, yet every one must acknowledge to some 
extent the sway of these intangible forces. Our 
literature is filled with the efforts of men who have 
tried to express the emotions they have felt when 
in the presence of that which appealed to them. 
Men cross the seas that they may stand in the 
presence of the mementoes of departed civilization, 
"Old, forgotten, far off things and battles long 
ago." Yet I doubt whether anything has in it more 
of this mystic appeal than the life of old farms as 
expressed in pastures with bright brooks and 
spreading trees, and cow-paths worn hard and 
sunken in the turf. 

Gray's Elegy in a Country Church Yard is by 
common consent the one almost faultlessly perfect 
pastoral poem of our English tongue, and when the 
poet wished to convey the thought of peace de- 
scending with the sunset like a mantle over a lovely 
summer land, he hit on that line whose cadence 



56 THE COW 

once heard must ever linger in our hearts, "The 
lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea." Just on the 
side, I am inclined to question the accuracy of the 
poet's observation. In America, at least, cattle do 
not spend much time lowing when at pasture. On 
the whole they are silent beasts, whereas sheep 
bleat long and loud under the slightest disturbance 
or excitement. It is true that the cow separated 
from her calf (more especially if reminded of the 
separation by a painfully full udder) will some- 
times low (in the speech of the farm, "beller" or 
"bawl" ) most persistently. So also, if a part of the 
herd has broken out into a forbidden field, those 
still left behind will frequently lift up their voices 
in frenzied inquiries as to just how it happened. A 
high spirited uneasy bull confined in a stall may 
make himself a nuisance by "the mimic thunder 
in his cry" as he roars out his challenge to his 
imaginary rival, but, on the whole, the contented 
cow is dumb. 

"Wind slowly o'er the lea," however, is good 
poetry and correct zoology. The old migratory 
instinct of the wild cow still survives and a herd 
ranging in a good sized pasture covers it rather 
widely and systematically under a recognized 
leadership. A herd will commonly feed for a few 
hours until full, and then lie down in a fairly com- 
pact group to ruminate, and after an hour or two, 
apparently in obedience to a common impulse, they 
will get up and start for another part of the field. 



COW-PASTUEES AND COW-PATHS 57 

In these short migrations it will be noted that 
certain individuals are nearly always at the front, 
while others quite as surely trail along behind. 
When thus "going somewhere" they are fond of 
walking single file as their well-defined, hard- 
beaten, and often somewhat sunken cow-paths 
attest. 

As commonplace a thing as a cow-path, by the 
way, is really a record worth study and musing. 
The same path is followed year after year, and if 
obliterated by plowing and later the field is again 
returned to pasture, it will be reestablished fol- 
lowing almost exactly the same course. The ex- 
planation is simply that the cow is a past-master 
in the engineering art of choosing the easiest grade 
between two points. Emphatically she does not go 
over a knoll, she goes around, and one can only 
wish that the pioneers who were responsible for 
the roads through our hill countiy might have had 
just a little of this good cow sense. The cow does 
not stick to paths when in a hurry or urged on by 
a driver, but they make use of them when on their 
leisurely journeys. Sheep, by the way, have this 
same habit of wandering in beaten trails. I do not 
know that the most enthusiastic lover of the cow 
will contend that she is remarkable for her in- 
telligence. She has neither the spirit and courage 
of the horse nor the love of mankind that marks the 
dog, nor the devotion to locality as distinguished 
from attachment to persons that distinguishes the 



58 THE COW 

cat, and I am afraid the common barnyard variety 
of hog is her intellectual superior. This is as it 
should be, for the extreme dairy "temperament" is 
characterized by placidity, not to say a phlegmatic 
disposition. 

The modern dairy cow is a very artificial crea- 
ture who by long centuries of environment and 
selection has come to have a stomach capable of 
digesting unbelievable quantities of food, and an 
abnormally developed mammary gland that may 
secrete milk enough for three or four calves, while 
at the same time she has very largely lost her old- 
time keenness of hearing and scent. She remains, 
however, a creature of habit and an excellent judge 
of meal time, without the necessity of observing 
the sun. If she knows that there is a little handful 
of meal ready in her manger, she will be waiting 
at the bars to meet you at milking time. So also, 
the cow with an uncomfortably full udder comes 
to understand that relief awaits her at the hand 
of the milker, and so she learns to present herself 
for his attention. After all, man is not the only 
animal who is most strongly appealed to through 
the stomach. 

In all the year there is just one perfect month 
for cows to pasture and that is June. Then the 
grass is lush and abundant, and if there be a cow 
heaven it must be typified by a pasture field in 
June when she lies knee deep in verdant fragrant 
grass with the sunlight flooding the land and the 



COW-PASTUKES AND COW-PATHS 59 

pasture brushed with light and shadow, as the 
fleecy clouds drift across the sky. With July the 
grass becomes less abundant and palatable, and 
then begins the plague of cattle flies and lesser 
insect pests which sometimes make August a 
month of almost maddening torment and seriously 
diminish the milk-flow. With the coming of the 
first sharp frosts the insects largely disappear, 
although they seem particularly savage in their 
attacks when aroused during the heat of some of 
those wonderful belated summer days that fall in 
early autumn. 

It often happens that the aftermath may be 
grazed in September and early October with most 
excellent results so far as the cow is concerned, 
although the practice is bad from the standpoint of 
maintaining productive meadows. Most of us who 
are cow-keepers, however, succumb to the tempta- 
tion to follow this easy practice. Some years 
when we have a warm moist fall, we may lightly 
graze the winter wheat or rye with little apparent 
injury to the crop. This lush delicious forage is 
unsurpassed, — possibly unequalled among all feeds. 
It will never fail to stimulate the milk-flow in the 
most astonishing way. However, as October draws 
on, the grass becomes short and frosted and less 
nutritious and the wise dairyman will usually be 
content to have his cows almost on full winter 
rations by the middle of that most glorious month. 

Doubtless it is true that pasture will be an ever 



60 THE COW 

decreasing factor in our scheme of dairy industry. 
We are told that it is very much wiser and more 
progressive and better all around to grow soiling 
crops and cut and carry them to the cow in the 
barn. One may deliver quite a fine sounding lec- 
ture on the economic advantage of soiling cows. 
But I am glad that there are so many farms where 
cow-pastures can never pass. The rich corn-belt 
farmer will let his cows drink water out of an iron 
bowl in the stall or out of a concrete watering 
trough where water is pumped from a driven well 
by a gasoline engine. But my dream-farm will al- 
ways have old rocky hillside pastures, threaded 
and laced with cow-paths where old trees cast deep 
shadows and little ravines with thickets make 
caverns of shade, and cows drink out of little bright 
running brooks and stand at the bars until the 
children come home from school to call them to 
the barns. And I like the unremembered Harvard 
student who made a verse about it thus : 

"She stood at the bars as the sun went down 
At the close of a beautiful summer day; 
Her eyes were tender and big and brown 
Her breath was as sweet as the new mown hay." 



VI 

CONCERNING OLD STONE WALLS AND 
COWS AND OTHER THINGS 

The final test to be applied to any type of farm- 
ing is the kind of rural civilization that is nour- 
ished by it. Every one with capacity to call up 
visions of bygone things, and who has been so 
blessed in childhood and youth as to have known 
the life of a well conditioned farm, will possess 
within himself a treasure house of halcyon mem- 
ories. And every one will visualise a different pic- 
ture of many diverse elements, yet each of them at 
heart will be very much the same for each will glow 
with the perennial magic of the Land. 

The old man whose locks are thin and white will 
sit in the sun and close his eyes and hear again 
across the years the ring of the whet-stone on the 
steel and the swishing music of the swinging scythe, 
or he will see the rhythmic sweep of cradlers laying 
the long swaths of wheat and other men following 
them to bind the sheaves with bands of twisted 
straw, or he will remember again the bubbly sound 
of milk being drawn from full udders into foaming 
pails and the muffled gurgle of the old dash churn. 

61 



62 THE COW 

Then too, there will come to him memories of 
snowbound days and the sound of beating flails on 
threshing floors and the thud of the loom and the 
whining song of the spinning-wheel beside the 
kitchen flre — for all these forgotten things were 
on our farms within the retrospect of many living 
men. 

And to the man from our corn-belt states will 
come pictures of a fat and fertile land where the 
sun comes up, not over wooded eastern hills, but 
out of a sea of grain and runs his course and drops 
down and is lost in corn-fields and meadows. 
Boyhood memories to him will be of long straight 
corn rows under August sun and the clack of the 
grain-binder and the snarl and whine and boom of 
the great steam threshing-machine and men going 
back and forth across the fields to husk the corn 
when autumn frosts grow sharp. These he remem- 
bers and many other things. And yet other men 
whose happy fate it was to live in our fat Ontario 
Shore country will see orchards flowery in May and 
great heaps of red and russet apples beneath the 
trees, glowing in October days, or will behold again 
the gathering of purple grapes when the air is 
heavy with the fragrance of the vine and the land 
is full of joy, and for him these horticultural mem- 
ories will be the best in life. But I am persuaded 
that to no one else can come so many visions as to 
the boy of the dairy farm. 

For I see an old red barn and beyond the barn 



OLD STONE WALLS 63 

an orchard of gnarled and ancient apple trees which 
great grandfather planted when he looked out on 
life with sunny eyes a hundred years before. This 
orchard had always blooms in May and always 
there were apples from August until the last hard 
winter fruit was gathered in. There were Ox ap- 
ples and Peggy Sweets and Hooks and Goodyear 
Pippins and Long Stems, and other sorts unknown 
to any pomologist save the farm boy, and their 
flavor and their fragrance will never pass. Be- 
yond the orchard is a lane with stone walls on 
either side and walnut trees and wild beasts of 
the forest — chipmunks and chattering red squirrels 
and even woodchucks seeking shelter with shrill 
whistles of fright. And then at the end of the lane 
is yet another enchanted land — a grove of pine 
trees which dropped down pungent scented cones 
and whispered and sobbed even on quiet sunny 
days, and which, on windy evenings, when I was 
late with the cows, made a great solemn sound like 
the sea surf trampling on the sand. 

Nor is this all, for beyond the pine grove are 
more walnut trees and great umbrella elms and 
maples from which to make sugar in the spring. 
There is a stream which is bright and clear and 
makes a pleasant babble in May and early June, 
but grows lazy and feeble as the summer wanes. 
If you lie prone on the little plank bridge ( as I do 
still) and gaze steadfastly into the pool beneath, 
you may see darting minnows and dace and even 



64 THE COW 

suckers, and these fishes years ago were the finny 
leviathan of the deep. Then across the brook and 
running up against the "mountain" to meet the 
woodland are fifty acres of pasture — a land of trees 
and rocks and little ravines and old stone walls 
mostly fallen down. Here the cattle of Hillside 
Farm have come to pasture for all its history and 
may, I hope, for generations yet to come. Always 
in the speech of our farm it has been designated 
as "across the creek," meaning thereby a region — 
and always for me it was an enchanted land. Is 
it not a priceless heritage for a boy to have the 
privilege when the sun is low, of going through 
scenes like these — to climb the hill and call the 
cows and send them splashing through the brook 
and then on up through the grove and lane and 
orchard and to the barn, and after milking to take 
them back again and leave them keeping watch 
under the stars? On such things as these was my 
boyhood fed and my little clear-eyed son also knew 
all these enchantments. 

You may not judge a farm or determine its value 
by the familiar standards of acreage or fertility 
or topography or access to markets. You may not 
reckon its desirability even by the social charac- 
ter of the rural community of which it is a part. 
Three things there are which must go to make up 
my dream-farm. First, it must be a place where 
there are animals as well as crops, for the greatest 
interest in country life can come only from breath- 



OLD STONE WALLS 65 

ing moving things. Of all our animals, no other 
has so much of contact with human life and of the 
poetry of the ages as the dairy cow. Secondly, 
this farm must lie in the Hill-Country so that for 
the boy there may be rocks to climb and woodlands 
to explore and little ravines to wander in and 
great peaceful hills to which he may lift up his 
eyes and purple distances across which to gaze. 
And thirdly, this farm must be in the old agricul- 
tural East with a continuity of history — a farm 
to which has come the glory of the years, where 
men and women have lived and wrought out their 
lives and been gathered to their fathers. There is 
in truth something stirring, something epic, in 
the pioneer setting up his home on the forefront 
of civilization. I am told that men come at length 
to love the limitless prarie and its clear distances 
and its blowing air. But when I see my ideal farm 
it is always with barns and drowsy cows, and it 
will lie in the lap of the valley where the summits 
of the hills are wooded and blue and far away, and 
it will be an old farm so that the folk who dwell 
there will speak of things in terms of generations 
instead of years. And I confess that while good 
farming bids us have new barns that are white 
within and gleaming with paint without, yet I love 
old spreading barns with swallows under the eaves 
and colonies of doves within the gables. And I 
like farm-houses, good sized and suggestive of 
generous life but not too spick and span. For all 



66 THE COW 

worthy old houses are thronged with ghosts — 
ghosts of happy bridals when a young man and a 
woman stand, with clasped hands and their eyes 
solemn with love and the wonder and the mystery 
of it all. There are ghosts of infants haunting 
dim upper chambers with memories of hush and 
expectation and then of joy because a child is born 
into the world. Then there are other and more 
somber ghosts telling of how the master of the 
farm full of days and honor was ready to leave 
the home, and how the masters of neighboring 
farms have come in with solemn manner and 
carried him first to the old church and then to the 
burial place to mingle his own with the family 
dust. 

Old farms gather to themselves what only the 
years can purchase — traditions. There are tradi- 
tions of disaster or of success, stories of the lean 
years when hail swept the farm in July or when 
the corn frosted in August — tales of the fat years 
when the wheat at harvest (as once in many years 
it did) stood so thick and strong that on the great 
billow of bowing heads the men laid the cradle 
and it did not fall to the ground. Many are the 
stories such as these which cluster around old 
farms. 

Perhaps if there is any object which represents 
the very essence of farm sentiment, it is old stone 
walls. There is plenty of utility but very little 
sentiment in barbed wire. You cannot sit on a 



OLD STONE WALLS 67 

barbed wire fence. You cannot even moralize on 
it. You avoid it and go around on the other side. 
It may have an air of smart newness but nothing 
more. A stone wall is lovely in decay. It is al- 
ways a text-book of geology, and it is a sure founda- 
tion for dreams and memories. I wonder whether 
I could love a farm that had no stone walls. 
There is a sort of artificial beauty in a carefully 
trained hedge beside a velvet lawn, but there is 
genuine poetry in a moss-grown and tumbled-down 
stone wall in a pasture, especially if there be a 
cow-path beside it. A stretch of such wall sug- 
gests a volume of farm history. 

So while a stranger or my friend sees only some 
acres of grassy hillside with old trees and rocks 
and ancient walls, I see more. I see a stalwart 
pioneer chopping out a place for the home and the 
log cabin rising in the clearing. I see the first 
wheat crop growing bronze and golden with black- 
ening stumps amid it like tiny islands in a yellow 
sea. I see the cabin become a home because there 
is a woman happy in her toil and sturdy children 
playing by the door. I watch the years slip past 
and the domain of the farmer broaden as he pushes 
the forest further back from his hearth-stone. I 
behold him and his sons and his men and his ox- 
team — always the ox-team — as he clears the land 
of stones and piles them up into walls, monuments 
to his time. I see him through the rich years of 
his prime while his family is growing up, wres- 



68 THE COW 

tling always with the primitive herculean labors 
of the pioneer, and then one day I see an old and 
time-worn man with a form built for strength but 
very still, carried out on his last going, and I see 
two of his sons take up the work where he laid it 
down, still clearing the land and building always 
more walls. 

I confess that with us building stone walls is at- 
taining the dignity of a lost art. I do not think 
this is because we are sluggards but rather be- 
cause there are so many mills drawing wire and 
such wonderful mechanical fingers weaving it into 
ready-made fencing at veiy moderate prices a rod. 

But in the Hill-Country those long gray lines of 
piled-up stone represent a very important part of 
the epic labors of the pioneer. I believe that the 
toil invested in this particular farm activity in 
the northeastern and New England states during 
the last three hundred years would in the aggre- 
gate exceed that involved in building the Panama 
Canal or our transcontinental railways. It was 
accomplished by men who counted not the hours 
and who labored with enthusiasm because they felt 
that theirs was a goodly heritage. 

The pitiful fact about it all, however, is that 
very often this has proved unrewarded toil. It 
seems to me that there was something fine about 
these earlier generations of men — something that 
we have lost. In the Hill-Country of New York 
and New England where land values are low and 



OLD STONE WALLS 69 

agriculture is decadent, there are so often stone 
walls laid by some man whose heart beat high with 
hope and who wrought at his work with conscien- 
tious care because he felt the artist's pride in his 
labors and deemed that he built for children's 
children. I hope that he laid down his good gray 
head at the last secure in his faith in the land he 
owned. But his son could never know his father's 
steadfast faith. He knew that once the fertile 
lands of the great corn-belt states began to pour 
their agricultural wealth into the world, the old 
regime in the East must pass forever. The open- 
ing up of the Mississippi Basin marked the end of 
an era in much of the old East, and one of our yet 
unsolved problems is the readjustment of the eco- 
nomic and social ills that followed. 

I am thinking now of an old farmstead which is 
locally famous for its walls. It was only a poor 
thin farm at best, skirting the narrow valley of a 
little creek and running far up against the steep 
and rocky hillsides. It is such a farm as can never 
give more than narrow opportunities and then 
only as the result of grinding toil. Yet on this 
farm a man spent a long life, and when he died, 
he left it fenced by high, smooth, straight stone 
walls. It seems pathetic that a man should so — as 
we may be tempted to say — have wasted his life. 
Yet perhaps for him there was compensation in 
his work. He was a patient sober man of charac- 
ter and ideals. I know that men called him a good 



70 THE COW 

neighbor. I know that according to his vision he 
loved and labored for the tiny country church. 
We cannot tell but that he worked out what was 
for him a sound and satisfactory philosophy of 
life as he patiently and skillfully piled stone on 
stone. But he is gone, and strangers carelessly 
till his loved acres, and the walls are falling down 
with the years and no man rebuilds them, and 
therein lies the pathos of his story. 

This much remains, however, that a stone wall 
can never become common or mean. While it 
stands, it is a monument to the industry and abid- 
ing faith of a strong man, and even when it falls 
it is a part of the landscape and not a scar on it. 
Gradually Nature hides it beneath shrubs and run- 
ning vines, and slowly by geologic law it sinks 
back into the bosom of the earth from which it 
came. 

Some things in especial measure breathe the ro- 
mance and poetry and magic of life on the land. 
Such are rows of weather-beaten droning bee- 
hives under gnarled and ancient apple trees, and 
running streams with cows standing knee deep in 
clear pools and long shady lanes with many beaten 
cow-paths, and boys calling the cows when the sun 
is low, and sunken mossy stone walls, and these 
last are the best and richest. 



VII 

THE COW TRIBES 

In those far-off centuries when herds of wild 
cattle ranged through the forests of northern 
Europe, the individuals were presumably very 
much alike in type, size, and color markings. It 
seems to be a law of biology that when any species 
of plant or animal exists for a long period of time 
under an unchanging environment, a general uni- 
formity of type results. For example, among wild 
deer, the American bison, robins, chipmunks or 
woodchucks, with rare exceptions, every individual 
of a species is so like every other member that one 
exact zoological description suffices for all. On 
the other hand, when the environment, or the daily 
life conditions, is changed, immediately the ten- 
dency to mutations is exhibited, the appearance of 
individuals possessing new or unusual characters. 
The cow has been wonderfully altered under do- 
mestication, partly because new traits and charac- 
ters have come unconsciously in response to new 
surroundings, partly because her master and 
owner has encouraged and preserved these new 
developments by keeping and rearing especially 

71 



n THE cow 

the calves of those cows that, judged by his stan- 
dards, seemed to him best or most desirable. 

In discussing the theory of breeding and the 
results that have been attained, we have always 
assumed that these changes have come about al- 
most wholly through the conscious selection and 
agency of man. It is altogether probable, how- 
ever, that a very large part of the modification of 
our domestic animals has resulted from a natural 
biologic selection rather than from the deliberate 
methods and plans of the breeder. An excellent 
example of how Nature works (and sometimes con- 
trariwise) with man in his breeding operations is 
the little Kerry cow or the tiny Shetland pony. 
These animals are practically dwarfs, not because 
their owners have systematically selected the off- 
spring of the smallest mothers, but rather because 
of a law that runs true throughout all life. The 
law may be stated thus: "Where the food supply 
is scanty and uncertain, the size of organisms tends 
to decrease." 

In any case, there are on our American farms 
today about twenty different breeds of cattle which 
are distinguished from each other not only by size, 
form, or color markings, but more remarkably by 
functions as well, and yet all of them must ac- 
knowledge the wild cow of Europe as a common 
ancestress. 

The larger part of the story of the breeding of 
the cow is lost in the unwritten past. Certain it 



THE COW TEIBES 73 

is that in the days when man was still a nomad 
with his herds and long before he had any ad- 
vanced civilization or written records or even tra- 
ditions of his work, the cow had already been 
greatly modified from the wild form and very dis- 
tinct breed types had arisen. With all our mod- 
ern science and biological theories, we must con- 
fess that long ago there were simple-hearted un- 
lettered pastoralists who, nevertheless, were con- 
structive breeders. Within the last two centuries 
a race of English and Scotch farmers, Thomas 
Bakewell, the brothers Charles and Robert Colling, 
Thomas Bates, Thomas Booth and his sons John 
and Richard, and Amos Cruickshank, proved to be 
men with a genius for judging and selecting ani- 
mals and endowed with a patience and persistency 
of purpose which enabled them to accomplish much 
in that scientific art where haste counts for noth- 
ing. The first and perhaps the greatest of this 
line of breeders was Bakewell (1725-1795). He 
pursued the improvement of cattle, horses, sheep 
and swine with vast enthusiasm and with a success 
that in his own lifetime was recognized throughout 
England. He seems to have possessed an almost 
uncanny skill in his selection of animals for mat- 
ing, and he boldly practiced and attributed much 
of his success to his use of the principles of close 
inbreeding in order to fix desirable characters. 

After all, however, there is hardly a breed of 
cattle today that represents the deliberate crea- 



74 THE COW 

tion of any man or group of men. Our modern con- 
tribution has been in the improvement of types 
already established and in the keeping of exact 
records of ancestry and production through the 
various registry associations and herd-books. As 
elsewhere in our agriculture, we have only builded 
on the foundations laid by forgotten men. 

It has sometimes been held as a reproach to our 
new world agriculture that we have originated 
and developed very few distinctively American 
breeds of domestic animals. This statement is not 
true regarding swine, for our most popular breeds, 
as Duroc-Jersey, Poland-China, Chester-White, 
Cheshire, and others, are strictly of American 
origin. Also the light fast type of harness horse 
is largely an American product. On the other 
hand, all of our many breeds of sheep are old 
European strains unless we assume that the fine- 
wooled sheep, the Merino, has been so modified 
under American conditions that it deserves to be 
ranked as a native breed. Every breed of cattle, 
with the exception of the little known French- 
Canadian and two or three very unimportant 
polled types of older breeds, are of European 
origin. 

As a matter of fact, the very many diverse fami- 
lies of cattle in Europe represent not so much a 
definite conscious effort to build up a strain ac- 
cording to certain preconceived ideals and stand- 
ards, but rather they stand for races that have 



THE COW TKIBES 75 

been developed within limited geographical ranges 
largely because there has been so little communi- 
cation between different sections. It has been said 
that almost every English shire had its own pe- 
culiar breed. This could never have occurred in 
America where there is a great inter-state cattle 
trade which insures a very general distribution 
and exchange of breed types over the entire coun- 
try. 

There is nothing occult or mysterious about the 
establishment of a brand new breed of any of our 
domestic animals. Some one may have in mind- 
certain functions or form or more likely merely 
fanciful characters or color not possessed by any 
breed and which he thinks are worth perpetuating. 
Probably he will own or have in mind certain in- 
dividuals that approximate the desired type. Our 
farm animals are rather plastic anyway, much 
more so than the wild forms. A few generations 
of careful selection and mating together with the 
culling out of those specimens that fail to be in 
line with the desired forms, will suffice to give 
them a certain uniformity and fixity of type. He 
may then interest some other men in the same proj- 
ect, incorporate as an association or club, adopt 
a set of rules and standards, appoint a secretary 
to be the official recorder of data relative to pedi- 
grees and other matters, begin the publication of a 
herd-book, and a new breed is launched on the 
world. If in addition to this, those interested can 



76 THE COW 

promote the sale of their animals at substantial 
prices, the success of the new venture is assured. 
Such fiat breed creation is occasionally pursued 
among our farm animals and very frequently in 
the case of poultry. It must be said that such 
efforts serve no useful practice and should be dis- 
couraged. We have now all the types of farm 
animals that can be of any real use. A consider- 
able proportion of those we already have exist 
mainly for the purpose of winning premiums at 
fairs and selling stock to those misguided agricul- 
turists who continually seek some new thing. It 
will certainly be wiser to spend time and energy 
on further improvement of our standard types 
rather than to seek to add to their number. 

It is rather interesting and surprising to note 
that as far as the exact recording and registry of 
pedigrees is concerned, the systematic improve- 
ment of the beef breeds considerably antedates 
that of dairy cattle. The oldest live-stock registry 
in the world is the Shorthorn herd-book, the first 
volume being published by George Coats of York- 
shire, England, in 1822, and authentic private rec- 
ords of Shorthorn pedigree date back as far as 
1750. If exact geneological records extending 
across many generations are the test, some families 
of Shorthorns are the aristocrats of the bovine 
world because the herd-books of the other breeds 
were founded much later. The first Hereford herd- 
book goes back to 1846. The oldest American live- 



THE COW TEIBES 77 

stock registry is the Ayrshire record established 
in New England in 1863. The Jersey and Hol- 
stein records were begun about 1872 and the 
Guernsey in 1877. The herd-books of the minor 
breeds are of still more recent origin. The whole 
usefulness of the system of pedigrees and regis- 
tration depends on records rigorously supervised 
and honestly kept and which are correct to the 
best of human ability. In the end, the whole sys- 
tem rests on the conscientious honesty of the indi- 
vidual breeder. The temptations and opportuni- 
ties to substitute and to falsify records in various 
ways are great and detection is well-nigh impos- 
sible. Occasional scandals have been brought to 
light, but, on the whole, the number is few and 
the associations have dealt severely with the 
guilty. There is no reason to question the essen- 
tial correctness of our live-stock records. 

The breeds of cattle are usually classified into 
three groups: the special beef kinds, the special 
dairy breeds, and the general or dual-purpose sorts. 
The theory regarding the last is that they will give 
fairly profitable returns as dairy animals, and in 
addition their male calves will make good feeding 
steers, while they themselves will make a fair car- 
cass of beef when their daiiy days are over. The 
best comment on this theory is that not one of the 
so-called general-purpose breeds has ever won any 
wide popularity. Probably the nearest approach 
is in certain strains of milking Shorthorns. 



78 THE COW 

Of OTir nearly twenty breeds, only eight can be 
regarded as important so far as numbers are con- 
cerned. The four beef breeds that really compete 
for supremacy in the corn-belt country and that 
furnish the T-bone steak and prime ribs of beef 
for a hungry world are the Shorthorn, Hereford, 
Aberdeen-Angus and Galloway. There are four 
great special-purpose dairy breeds, all widely 
known and possessing individuals of the highest 
excellence. These are the Holstein, Jersey, Guern- 
sey and Ayrshire. 

The Holstein, coming from Holland, is pre- 
eminently the great milk breed, her particular 
characteristic being the ability to give large 
amounts of milk containing a rather low percen- 
tage of butter-fat. Under the conditions and basis 
of payment that prevails in the liquid milk market, 
this big black-and-white cow threatens to drive 
other breeds from the field. She has, on the whole, 
remained especially the cow of the practical work- 
ing farmer rather than the rich man's hobby. She 
has large size, vigor, hardiness and ability to 
utilize profitably great quantities of rough forage; 
and while her milk may lack the percentage of fat 
suitable for the most discriminating markets, she 
is all in all the most popular breed in the world. 
Perhaps we may paraphrase the famous expression 
regarding the Concord grape and say that she is 
the cow for the millions. 

It is remarkable that a tiny group of islands in 



THE COW TRIBES 79 

the English Channel should have given to the 
world two of its most widely known races of cattle. 
It is said that for centuries no foreign cattle have 
been imported to these islands and this natural 
isolation for a great period of time has resulted in 
two breeds, the Jersey and the Guernsey, which 
are of a very distinct type. They are alike in that 
both give milk containing an unusually high per- 
centage of butter-fat and, especially in the case of 
the Guernsey, with an abundance of yellow coloring 
matter (lactochrome),but in conformation and gen- 
eral appearance the two breeds are not closely akin. 

The Ayrshires from southwest Scotland, Robert 
Burns' country, are in character, size and quality of 
milk intermediate between the Holstein and the 
Channel Island breeds. They have been distrib- 
uted over almost the whole dairy world and have 
never lacked for warm admirers. The breed has 
some individuals that are excellent examples of 
dairy conformation, and they are renowned for 
their perfectly shaped udders ; yet they seem never 
to have attained as wide popularity as the other 
breeds. Possibly this may be because they are 
a little on the order of general-purpose dairy 
cattle. It is sometimes stated that no other cow 
will give as good returns from the grazing of steep 
and rocky pastures. The Ayrshire has been es- 
pecially popular in the cheese districts of Jeffer- 
son and St. Lawrence counties in New York. 

A true breeder of beef cattle will not be in- 



80 THE COW 

terested in their dairy qualities beyond the point 
of insuring that the dam will give enough milk 
to rear a good calf by suckling. The conformation 
and temperament which give a heavy loin and a 
meaty thigh, together with early maturity and the 
tendency to accumulate body fat, is directly an- 
tagonistic to great dairy performance. The story 
comes down to us how Booth, the great Shorthorn 
breeder, developed a strain of cows in v/hich the 
milk-making function was almost lost, and in his 
stables a calf stood between two cows because one 
could not properly support her calf. When he was 
an old man and showing visitors through his 
stables, it was his pleasure to walk down the long 
alleys behind those great mountains of flesh and 
slapping their broad rumps cry, "Gentlemen: 
What does a few quarts of milk from a cow amount 
to anyway?" 

A man's success or failure as a dairyman em- 
phatically does not depend on his choice of a breed, 
assuming, of course, that he chooses one of the 
special dairy kinds. The different individuals of 
a breed differ far more from each other than do 
the breeds as a whole. It is not too much to say 
that the breed is relatively unimportant as com- 
pared with markets, soils, rations and stable care. 
It is of supreme importance, however, that he have 
good individuals of some breed, and possibly even 
more, that he believe in and love his business and 
be a student of it. 



THE COW TRIBES 81 

Nevertheless, it is possible to lay down certain 
principles that may be useful in helping one to 
make a choice of some breed to which to devote 
one's energies. If a man is producing market milk 
under the usual commercial conditions and basis of 
payment, particularly if it be a market which buys 
on the basis of moderate costs rather than the high 
quality of the product, then the black-and-white 
Holstein will probably be best suited for his pur- 
pose, especially if his farm is fairly level and fertile 
and his pastures not too scanty. The Holstein 
cow was developed on the best pastures in the 
world where "when she wanted a bite of grass, she 
got a whole mouthful." When it comes to climb- 
ing steep and rocky hillsides and wandering far 
to crop a lean herbage, the Holstein is handicapped 
as compared with the lighter and more active 
breeds. 

On the other hand, for the economical produc- 
tion of butter-fat rather than fluid milk or for the 
supplying of a discriminating market milk trade, 
one of the Channel Island breeds will probably 
be a wiser choice. 

The Ayrshire must not be forgotten in this list. 
In her adaptability she really falls midway be- 
tween the other two classes. Wherever the Scotch- 
man has gone into the far comers of the earth, he 
has taken his cow, and at her best she is worthy of 
the race that created her. 



VIII 
THE REARING OF THE CALF 

As A rule, it will be best if the calf can be born 
in the autumn, September or October. There are 
sound reasons of good dairy management why this 
is usually best. For one thing, it brings the largest 
production of milk during the winter months when 
prices are much higher than in summer. This 
plan also allows the cows to stand dry and hence 
to need very little attention during the stress of 
midsummer farm activities, no small consideration 
as every dairyman knows. Then again the fall- 
born calf is likely to receive better care and at- 
tention and to make a more satisfactory growth. 
The spring calf, even with the best of intentions 
on the part of the owner, is too likely at times to 
be neglected in the rush of soil preparation and 
haying and harvest. The greatest enemy to thrift 
in a calf is not fairly low winter temperatures, but 
rather the flies and heat of July and August. 

If the weather is warm and dry, there is no bet- 
ter place for the calf to be bom than on a clean 
grassy pasture. Usually the other members of the 
herd will display very little interest in the event. 

82 



THE EEAEING OF THE CALF 83 

During much of the year, however, a roomy well- 
bedded box-stall should be provided. The period 
of gestation in cows is about 285 days, but a varia- 
tion of two weeks in either direction is not un- 
common. Just a day or two preceding parturi- 
tion, certain marked physical evidences appear 
which enable one accustomed to observe cows to 
know that calving is about to occur. The most 
marked of these is the relaxation of the pelvic 
ligaments and the abundant secretion of milk in 
the udder. Twelve or twenty-four hours pre- 
viously, the teats will fill with milk to such an ex- 
tent as to become somewhat firm and rigid and the 
coming of the calf will then not be long delayed. 
Rather close watch should now be kept in order to 
be prepared to render assistance in the occasional 
cases in which it is needed. Ordinarily, however, 
the youngster comes into the world with very little 
trouble, and if the mother lives up to the customs 
of her race she has within an hour very thoroughly 
cleaned her baby with her tongue (the bovine 
equivalent of a bath), it has taken its first meal 
from her full udder and curled up and gone to 
sleep. Maternity among cows seems to be a pass- 
ing incident rather than a great event. 

In the typical scheme of beef production, there 
is really no such problem as rearing the calf. It 
is merely allowed to remain with its mother and 
she brings it up strictly according to ancestral 
training and generally avoids all trouble of indi- 



84 THE COW 

gestion or other ills. But under the approved 
management of the modern dairy herd, all this is 
changed. The calf is torn from its mother for- 
ever when only twenty-four or forty-eight hours 
old, is taught to drink its milk out of a tin pail 
instead of nursing from its mother's udder, and 
after a few weeks at longest it is fed skim-milk 
instead of the rich creamy fluid that its dam 
secrete. It is no wonder that indigestion is some- 
times a veritable scourge among young calves. 
The real marvel is that they do not all die. We 
do incredible violence to every principle of calf 
hygiene. Nature provided that the food for the 
calf must be very slowly drawn from the mother 
and abundantly mixed with saliva in the course 
of suckling. Moreover, it was always at exactly 
the correct temperature and measured up to the 
highest standards of bacteriological cleanliness, 
and was taken in small quantities many times a 
day. We cause the calf to dump a twelve-hour 
supply of milk into its stomach at one time in a 
few big gulps, and, moreover, the temperature is 
generally too low. Very frequently the feeding 
pail is seeded with every imaginable variety of 
germs. In addition to all this, we feed too much. 
The calf will thrive better if it is never allowed 
to stuff itself to repletion, if it is fed only enough 
milk so that it is still a little hungry and eager for 
more. Perhaps the nursing calf may be allowed 



THE REARING OF THE CALF 85 

to gorge itself with all the milk it can hold, but 
this means disaster when artificially reared. 

The gospel of calf feeding may be stated in this 
way : Feed moderate quantities of milk at frequent 
intervals at about blood heat and out of a clean 
and scalded pail. Probably the ideal would be to 
feed a teacup full of milk a dozen times a day, 
but three or perhaps four times is about the limit 
under the conditions of practical dairy manage- 
ment. The amount that may be safely fed will 
vary through wide limits according to the size and 
vigor of the calf, but for the first week from two 
to four quarts a day will be enough. For the first 
ten days or two weeks of the youngster's life it 
should be fed whole milk, that is unskimmed milk, 
fresh from its mother or some other cow. The 
more vigorous and hearty the calf, the sooner we 
may begin to substitute some skim-milk until at 
three to five weeks old it will receive skim-milk 
only. 

After the calf is a few days old, it should have 
before it a little lock of bright early cut hay, pref- 
erably clover or alfalfa, and also a box with a 
handful of ground grain. A mixture of equal 
parts of wheat middlings and ground oats, to- 
gether with ten to fifteen per cent of oil-meal 
(ground flax-seed cake) will make an excellent 
grain ration. It is surprising how quickly a vigor- 
ous calf will begin to nibble a little hay and lick 



86 THE COW 

at the meal, and at two weeks old we may find her 
busily and happily chewing her little cud quite 
after the manner of her dam. Once a calf begins 
to eat freely of solid food the dangers of indiges- 
tion and bowel trouble are largely over. Milk may 
then be fed within any reasonable limits that the 
supply will permit, and no other food equals it for 
rapid growth and for putting an animal into the 
best condition. Another matter easily forgotton 
and yet important is to see that there is provided 
an abundance of bedding. Calves will not thrive 
in a damp and dirty stall. 

The autumn-bom calf will be ready to go to pas- 
ture as soon as the grass is plentiful the next 
spring. Some grain and shelter from flies during 
the first summer is the ideal, but it may not be 
practicable to provide these, especially if we are 
dependent on back or outlying pastures. 

In the case of pure-bred, high-class animals, 
when it is desirable to secure the greatest possible 
growth and when economy is a secondary con- 
sideration, it may be wisest to barn-feed the calf 
for the first year and not depend on pasture. It 
must not be forgotten, however, that this is an 
expensive system and on most farms we should ex- 
pect the calf to get its living to a considerable 
extent from pasture. The spring-bom calf, how- 
ever, would better spend its first summer in the 
bam, because if turned to grass when only a few 
months old the withdrawal of the milk, together 



THE BEARING OF THE CALF 87 

with the heat and flies, will result in a practical 
cessation of growth and possibly permanent in- 
jury. There is no period when liberal feeding pays 
better than with young animals. One of our agri- 
cultural barbarisms that still survives is the idea 
that young heifei*s may properly "rough it" 
through the first two years of life. This is a great 
mistake, because the first requisite of a good dairy 
animal is the ability to utilize large quantities of 
food, and we should lay the foundations for a 
vigorous digestion by liberal feeding during early 
life. In a general way, the grain food for young 
animals should be of some bulky nature rather 
than of a heavy and concentrated type. Nothing 
will be better than the old stand-by, a mixture of 
wheat bran and ground oats. Wheat bran is es- 
pecially indicated because of the large proportion 
of phosphorus and lime which it contains. These 
materials are the basis of the bones, and it is very 
desirable to encourage skeletonal development in 
the young heifer rather than excessive fatness. 

If well grown, the heifer may be bred when fif- 
teen to eighteen months old. She will then drop 
her first calf at two years to twenty-seven months 
of age. We are often told that "Nature is a wise 
Old Dame" and that she manages eveiything about 
right. Unfortunately when left to herself, she does 
not always manage this matter well, because very 
frequently the heifer will become a mother alto- 
gether too young, when not yet half grown, the 



88 THE COW 

result being that she gives but little milk and 
will be very late in coming to maturity. At the 
same time, it is generally agreed that to defer the 
first calf too late is a mistake. The heifer's busi- 
ness in life is to bear calves and yield milk, and 
it is well if her development along these lines be- 
gins before she is too mature. 



IX 

THE CARE OF THE MILKING HERD 

School-boy debating societies have long 
wrestled with the time-honored query as to whether 
the pen was mightier than the sword or water more 
destructive than fire. So men of more mature 
years have debated which was more important, to 
have good cows or to have them well cared for. 
It is breed versus feed. The obvious reply is that 
both must go together if the business of dairying 
is to be profitable. Men do not, however, always 
act according to this truth. Sometimes we find 
herds of excellent breeding where the food supply 
and comfort of the animals are neglected. On the 
other hand, it is not unusual to find men who are 
good caretakers but who forget that no amount of 
good food can secure high production from an in- 
ferior cow. 

The care of cattle may be classified under: (a) 
Factors of comfort, such as comfortable stalls, 
protection from inclement weather, suitable stable 
temperatures, water supply and protection from 
insect pests; (b) factors of the food supply; (c) 
factors of dairy management. 

89 



90 THE COW 

Good dairymen have always recognized that ease 
and comfort and content on the part of the cows 
are great factors in profitable milk production. 
The ideal would be an individual box-stall, say ten 
feet square, for every cow where she might freely 
move around or lie stretched out at perfect ease 
while she chewed her cud and manufactured milk. 
Unfortunately this system occupies barn room so 
lavishly and uneconomically and is so inconvenient 
and extravagant of bedding if decent cleanliness 
is to be maintained, that it is almost never fol- 
lowed in large herds as a regular practice. How- 
ever, nearly all breeders of pure-bred cows who 
are making advanced registry records and wish to 
secure the last possible ounce of milk without 
counting the cost, find that they attain the maxi- 
mum results by giving each cow the freedom of 
her separate box-stall. Of course, on every dairy 
farm there ought to be a few box-stalls for cows 
needing particular attention and especially for 
those about to calve. 

The cow is probably less sensitive to fairly low 
temperatures than we have sometimes been led to 
think. Thousands of years ago her ancestors 
passed the fairly severe winters of northern Europe 
with no shelter other than that afforded by the 
forests. As long as she has a dry coat and a dry 
bed, she probably prefers a cool rather than a warm 
and stuffy stable. Rain worries her not at all until 
the cold storms of autumn come on, when she 



THE CARE OF THE MILKING HEED 91 

should be housed at night or in very unpleasant 
weather. 

The old idea of dairymen was that the cow 
should be given an opportunity for plenty of exer- 
cise around the barnyard throughout the winter. 
Today practice has veered to the other extreme, 
and it is not uncommon to find cows that are never 
released from the stanchion from November to 
May. It may be a question for debate as to the 
ultimate effect on offspring and constitutional 
vigor, but there seems to be no doubt that cattle 
will give excellent dairy production under such 
close confinement. 

Unquestionably, flies and other insect pests are 
a very serious drawback to cow comfort during 
midsummer and early autumn. They are annoyed 
by several species of flies and gnats. It is interest- 
ing to note that about the year 1890 the north- 
eastern states received a new fly pest never ob- 
served until that time. This was christened the 
Texas horn-fly, the popular belief being that it was 
an importation from that state. It has thriven 
marvelously since its introduction and seems to 
have displaced or driven out what we very un- 
scientifically called the "old-fashioned cow-fly." 

The bot-fly or ox-warble lays its eggs so that they 
are taken into the stomach of the cow. Later the 
tiny larva burrows through the body of its host, 
making a long migration until it establishes itself 
beneath the skin of the back where it passes the 



92 THE COW 

winter, to emerge nearly a year later as a big fat 
repulsive grub. Big as they are, they do not seem 
to cause cattle any particular annoyance. It may 
be added that their life history as worked out by 
the entomologists is one of the most marvelous of 
Nature's strange miracles. The bot-fly seems to 
be quite local in its distribution. On the home 
pastures at Hillside Farm we never find it, but 
cattle sent to an outlying pasture two miles away 
are sure to return bearing a crop of bots that will 
become prominent in late winter. 

Occasionally the torment from insect pests be- 
comes so maddening that the whole herd will start 
on a gallop across the field, each cow carrying her 
tail aloft like a banner. These rushes are appar- 
ently a desperate effort to leave behind or shake 
off their tormentors. Fortunately we are able to 
give cows some measure of relief by lightly spray- 
ing the body, especially the parts that cannot be 
reached by the tail, once each day with some one of 
the numerous commercial fly repellents. An ex- 
penditure of fifty cents a cow each season for time 
and material will do much to mitigate an annoy- 
ance that is very costly both in milk and flesh. 

Flies disappear after a few sharp frosts, but in 
winter their place is taken by two or more species 
of lice. These vermin are no respecters of persons 
and are sometimes troublesome in the best stables. 
They may become so bad as to cause cows to rub 
raw and bleeding patches on the skin in the effort 



THE CARE OF THE MILKING HEED 93 

to relieve the intolerable itching and sometimes 
may hasten the death of unthrifty and poorly fed 
calves. Any number of powders, ointments and 
washes are recommended as remedies, and most 
of them are efflcient if used persistently. 

Another factor of comfort is the water supply. 
It must be confessed that cattle are in no way fas- 
tidious as to their drinking place and often seem 
quite as well pleased with a green and stagnant 
pool as with a running brook or clear spring. 
However, a good water supply in winter is of the 
utmost importance. If the supply is a trough in 
the barnyard, it should be warmed enough to keep 
it free from ice. There are many inexpensive types 
of water-tank heaters to choose from. It will, how- 
ever, be a sound investment and not an extrava- 
gance to provide a system of automatic individual 
drinking buckets for the stable. A cow will get 
along by drinking a great quantity of water (often 
from 70 to 100 pounds a day when on dry feed) 
once or twice a day, but when forced to do this she 
is doubtless thirsty much of the time, while if she 
has it available she will take a sip or a few swal- 
lows at very frequent intervals. Milk is about 87 
per cent water, and there is no other constituent 
that we can provide so cheaply. However, both 
statute law and ethics decree that it can be added 
only through the cow. 

Many volumes have been written concerning the 
feeding of animals and the current literature of 



94 THE COW 

the subject, both in popular periodicals and in re- 
search publications, is well-nigh unlimited. There- 
fore, a few broad generalizations will be sufficient, 
without any attempt at discussion. 

Wise feeding of the cow must consider three as- 
sociated factors. Food must be abundant, palat- 
able, and chosen from such sources and in such 
relative amounts that it will supply the different 
classes of nutrients in such proportions as will 
best minister to the needs of the animals. 

This is a simple definition, but to measure up to 
its requirements involves practical experience, 
technical training and a large proportion of good 
cow-sense. 

Sometimes we talk very technically and at much 
length about the "balanced ration." What we 
mean is a ration which by its chemical composition 
and make-up is fitted to supply all the require- 
ments of the animal. It is now just about a half- 
century since the principles of quantitative chemi- 
cal analysis began to be applied to feeding stuffs 
and to the animal body, to the milk and also to 
the wastes or excreted food residues. Some one 
then asked a most simple and natural question, 
"Ought there to be any particular relationship be- 
tween what we feed an animal and the product 
that we expect to derive from the food?" and thus 
this discussion was begun and surely has never 
been allowed to lapse. 

The broad idea of the balanced ration is funda- 



THE CAEE OF THE MILKING HEED 95 

mentally sound, but we make a great mistake when 
we try to convert it into a rigid mathematical for- 
mula. Successful feeding of the animal is not only 
a question of correct relative proportions of pro- 
tein, carbohydrates and fat, but also of economy 
measured in cost in cents each day. It is more a 
question of palatability than of the absolute best 
theoretical ration. Animals at different seasons 
and localities have had to adapt themselves to very 
wide variations in diet, and fortunately their re- 
quirements are rather elastic. Study of tables of 
composition and digestibility are suggestive, but 
we must not forget the individuality of the animal. 
The more we consider this topic of feeding, the 
more clearly we come to understand that the best 
rations are not compounded in the laboratory but 
in the stable. A cow must eat to the very limit 
of her digestive powers if she is to do her best 
work. She must gorge herself "as full as a tick," 
and she will not do this unless her food fulfills her 
ideas of toothsomeness. Rations may be skillfully 
compounded, if you will, exactly to conform to the 
Wolff-Lehmann or any other standard, but they 
must also be compounded with experience and com- 
mon sense and a close and sympathetic study of 
the likes and dislikes of the cow. 

There are two fairly distinct types of dairying, 
so far .as management is .concerned — "summer" 
and "winter." The dairying of our fathers was 
almost wholly of the former type. It was planned 



96 THE COW 

to have the cows come fresh in April and May, so 
far as possible, and to depend almost wholly on 
pasture for production. The barn was not re- 
garded as a place to make milk; it was merely a 
device by which cows were maintained alive until 
spring. Until a generation ago this was about the 
only dairying known except within the milk-ship- 
ping radius of the towns and cities where there 
was an insistent demand for milk throughout the 
year. 

For many years an active educational propa- 
ganda has urged the wisdom of producing milk 
mainly in the winter rather than the summer 
months. In the main the arguments are sound. 
Winter prices are substantially higher, and it 
brings the larger part of the care of the herd in 
the time when the farm labor schedule is a little 
less strenuous than at seed-time and harvest. 
Doubtless, thoughtful dairymen will more and 
more come to consider the period beginning in 
autumn as the best dairy months. 

There is also the question as to what disposition 
shall be made of the milk. The market for milk is 
constantly and rapidly broadening and there are 
now a surprising number of distinct outlets. These 
are market milk (that is, milk to be consumed in 
the natural state), butter, cheese, condensed and 
evaporated milk, powdered milk, malted milk, ice- 
cream, milk in combination with chocolate, and a 
number of very special uses such as prepared in- 



THE CARE OF THE MILKING HEED 97 

fants' foods and various proprietary milk bever- 
ages like koumiss and bulgarzoon. In addition, 
there are a large number of commercial chemical 
by-products of skim-milk. 

Of these uses, market milk and butter are by far 
the most important. Milk for cheese-making in- 
cludes not only the common American or Cheddar 
cheese, but also a very great variety of so-called 
"fancy" or "soft" cheeses, such as Philadelphia 
Cream, Neufchatel and Roquefort. It is not the 
purpose of this little book to attempt any discus- 
sion of manufacturing methods. 

It is safe to say that in the South and in all sec- 
tions of the country with a large urban population, 
milk is usually worth more to sell as market milk 
than it. is for manufacturing purposes. However, 
the great dairy districts remote from centers of 
population must still depend on the commercial 
manufacturing establishments for their markets. 
Thus, seven states produce more than one-half of 
our total butter. 

In considering the question of markets, one point 
deserves to be emphasized. It is this: The dairy- 
man who can so arrange his business as to retain 
the skim-milk on the farm may not get as many 
dollars this month or this year, but he will have 
the satisfaction of feeling that he can grow calves 
and pigs which means the maintenance and up- 
building of the dairy herd and the conservation of 
soil fertility. This is the factor that must underlie 



98 THE COW 

a really enduring business. The writer lives in a 
dairy locality within two miles of a particularly 
advantageous market for liquid milk, and almost 
without exception the milk of this entire region 
goes to supply New York City. We almost alone 
have still held to the old farm custom and con- 
tinue to skim the milk at home and to sell only 
cream and pork and to raise all our promising 
heifer calves. The immediate returns may not be 
as large as if we should join the morning proces- 
sion of milk rigs, but we believe that the future 
justifies our plan. 

Sound daily management is a matter of produc- 
tive cows, convenient, sanitary and comfortable 
barns and stables, corn-fields and silos and hay 
from the grasses or better from the legumes. We 
do well to maintain the herd as far as possible 
from within our own fence lines, but in addition 
we shall probably find it necessary to purchase 
moderate quantities of protein concentrates. 

If we milk more than ten or fifteen cows, it will 
be wise to add the milking machine to our equip- 
ment. That it is a most successful saver of human 
labor no longer admits of debate. There is the 
disadvantage, however, that we do largely lose con- 
tact with our cows and the good custom of weigh- 
ing milk and keeping records is almost certain to 
fall into disuse. 



THE HEALTH OF THE HERD 

This little book makes no pretense of being in 
any way a treatise on veterinary medicine, but 
merely proposes to mention rather than discuss a 
few of the most important ailments of our dairy- 
herds. Many of the diseases of humans have their 
almost exact counterpart among bovines. A num- 
ber of specific infectious diseases are confined to 
cattle and at least one, anthrax, is of peculiar in- 
terest, because it is communicable to man, not fre- 
quently with fatal results. The five outstanding 
troubles that to some extent are always with us 
and that we can hardly hope to escape sooner or 
later are calf scours, epidemic or contagious abor- 
tion, parturient apoplexy or in the language of the 
stable "milk fever," bovine tuberculosis and garget. 

The first two are not well understood, and while 
the literature of these diseases is most voluminous, 
we seem to have no general agreement as to either 
the exact cause or the specific preventive measures 
to be adopted. Many investigators have come to 
think that the two troubles have a common cause 
and that a calf may be carried to full term and be 

99 



100 THE COW 

born in apparently good condition and yet perish 
rather promptly because of germs from a diseased 
mother. Certain it is that from time to time in 
our best cared-for herds, scours has proved a veri- 
table scourge that .neither painstaking attention 
nor the best veterinary skill has been able to arrest. 
The specific 'disease is not to be confounded with 
the chronic indigestion and diarrhea resulting 
from improper feeding and which will ordinarily 
be cured by removing the cause. 

Contagious abortion is without doubt the most 
serious disease of dairy cattle in America. Not 
only is there loss of production and frequent un- 
thrift and barrenness as a sequel, but in addition 
we have the loss of the offspring, which in the 
pure-bred herd is the most serious aspect. Noth- 
ing is more disheartening than to see calf after 
calf bom prematurely until perhaps hardly one re- 
mains. There is little doubt that it is an infectious 
germ disease, but as for its control there is a feel- 
ing of discouragement on the part of those who 
have had the most experience. One fortunate fact 
stands out, that, like many germ infections, it is 
self-limiting and one attack confers at least partial 
immunity against further ones. Probably it is safe 
to say that few herds escape contagious abortion, 
especially if there is some buying and selling of 
cattle. When a herd has heretofore been free, the 
initial attack is likely to be especially virulent. 
Usually an aborting cow will retain the fetal 



THE HEALTH OF THE HERD 101 

membranes, and some of the best students of the 
question insist that this condition can occur only 
as the result of a specific germ. The owner will 
find abundant discussion and advice available, and 
he may at least rest assured that if he will keep up 
his courage, care well for his animals and feed 
abundantly, he will gradually gather a herd that is 
at least partially immune so that a premature calf 
will be the exception instead of the rule. The 
writer has had considerable experience as a lay- 
man in the effort to control this disease, and he 
has no desire to offer specific advice or to combat 
any system of treatment. 

Milk fever or parturient apoplexy, while a 
once dreaded scourge, may now be fairly described 
as of mainly historical interest. The simple and 
remarkably efficient method for its cure is the one 
great outstanding triumph of veterinary medicine. 
Until less than a generation ago, the cow just 
easily delivered of a calf, more especially if she 
was a heavy milker and in the best condition, 
would be noticed to stagger, within a few moments 
go down, throw her head around against her side, 
breathe slowly and noisily, become unconscious 
and in the greater number of cases die within 
twelve to thirty-six hours. Every dairyman who 
had good well-fed cows came to know these symp- 
toms only too well. Of course we called the cow 
doctor and, according to the rules, he poured down 
the unconscious animal purgatives and aconite, but 



103 THE COW 

we usually buried her next day. It is true that 
much could be done by preventative measures. It 
was known that milk fever usually attacked cows 
that were well fed and fleshy, the precise condition 
in which intelligent dairymen try to have their cat- 
tle at freshing. We were advised to give her only a 
restricted diet for two weeks before calving, but 
to maintain a cow in this manner is totally opposed 
to all sound tenets of good daii'y management. 
Due to the great discovery of veterinarians we may 
now feed her well, and when the first premonitory 
symptoms are noticed the udder is pumped full of 
sterilized and filtered air until it is tense and drum- 
like and almost invariably within a few hours she 
will be apparently as well as ever. 

Bovine tuberculosis is by far the most talked- 
about of all cattle diseases, owing to the fact that 
many well-informed sanitarians believe that it may 
be transmitted to the human race as well. The oc- 
currence of tuberculosis in cattle has been recog- 
nized for many years, but so long as we were de- 
pendent on physical examination for its detection, 
no real progress toward eradication or control 
was possible. The discovery of tuberculin and its 
application in various forms to the tuberculin test 
has given a simple, inexpensive and on the whole 
remarkably accurate diagnostic agent which per- 
mits the detection, not only of advanced but of in- 
cipient cases as well. If bovine tuberculosis were 
confined entirely to the lower animals, it would not 



THE HEALTH OF THE HERD 103 

attract any very special attention, and it surely 
would not be possible to enlist both state and fed- 
eral aid in a far-reaching campaign for its eradica- 
tion, in which not only is there supervision of 
means of stamping it out, but also provisions 
whereby to a gi'eat extent the public assumes the 
financial burden involved in the destruction of the 
infected animals. Whether or not bovine tubercu- 
losis is transmissible to man is one of the perennial 
battlegrounds of the biologists, but the idea is at 
least very widely credited and explains in large 
part the peculiar interest which city boards of 
health have displayed concerning this disease. 

Once well established in a herd, tuberculosis is 
very serious from the economic side, apart from 
any questions of public hygiene. If the infection 
becomes general, there will be the unsatisfactory 
evidence of unthrifty calves and young stock and 
from time to time an occasional cow will go down 
with generalized "T.B." In any case, the public 
and the more progressive breeders are so aroused 
over the question that we are rapidly approaching 
the time when all purchases of cattle will be condi- 
tioned on passipg a tuberculin test. Solely from 
the standpoint of satisfaction and dairy produc- 
tion, no man can afford to keep an infected herd 
and if we grant its transmission to man the case 
for its eradication becomes infinitely stronger. 

Another trouble that is always with us and the 
loss from which runs into incalculable sums, sur- 



104 THE COW 

passing perhaps even epidemic abortion, is garget 
and udder injuries of one kind or another. There 
may be mechanical injury to the udder or inflamma- 
tion as the result of excessive or improper feeding 
or a specific infection may be passed from one cow 
to another. The latter type is commonly very 
much more severe and often treatment seems of 
little avail. As a result, every herd of much size 
will have spoiled udders, sometimes only one, some- 
times two or more quarters missing. A bad case 
of infective garget may lead to the actual loss of a 
large part of the udder by sloughing off. In this 
case, there will be severe constitutional disturb- 
ances with high fever and great loss of flesh. A 
good cow with only one teat gone will probably 
be worth keeping, but when half of the udder is lost 
it will be better to salvage her at the butcher's 
unless she is especially valuable on account of her 
offspring. Losses from garget are likely to be 
greatest in the best herds, as the cow with an 
intensely developed milking tendency seems to be 
most liable and also because the high feeding with 
concentrated protein grains practiced in the best 
stables acts as a predisposing cause. It may be 
added that care, patience and prompt use of some 
simple treatments will go far to minimize the 
losses. 

The American dairyman is very fortunate in 
not having to reckon with some very serious cattle 
plagues which are found in Europe and other parts 



THE HEALTH OP THE HERD 105 

of the world. Among these are pleuro-pneumonia, 
foot-and-mouth disease and rinderpest. The two 
former have at times attained a foothold on our 
shores but by a vigorous system of quarantine and 
the destruction of all infected and exposed animals 
they have been absolutely stamped out, the result- 
ing saving to American live-stock interests being 
beyond all calculation. Some of these temporaiy 
invasions have cost large sums, have involved the 
enforced slaughter of some very valuable herds of 
pure-bred cows, have entailed private financial 
hardship -and have aroused most bitter animosity 
against the authority charged with the enforce- 
ment of the control measure; and yet the some- 
what violent means adopted have been justified a 
thousandfold. Several times within a generation 
foot-and-mouth disease has thus been extinguished. 
It is a testimony to what can be accomplished by 
trained animal sanitarians armed with power, but 
it is perhaps too much to hope that like results 
can be attained with maladies like abortion and 
tuberculosis where the symptoms are slow in de- 
velopment and ntay lie long concealed. 

No man will go very far in the business of dairy- 
ing without suffering losses from disease. He may 
not have many mature animals die, but calf scours, 
abortion and garget will always be present and 
sometimes will take their toll. Nor need he feel, 
therefore, that he has been ignorant or careless in 
his management. Undoubtedly more intensive 



106 THE COW 

feeding, closer housing and a congested cow popu- 
lation has tended toward the increase of bovine 
disease. As an offset to this is the far more intel- 
ligent and rational treatment than in the old days. 
Some loss is a part of the dairy business, but skill 
in feeding and care and the eradication of the 
feeble and diseased animals will be the best meas- 
ures to minimize these losses. 



XI 

THE DEPRECIATION AND THE RENEWAL 
OF THE DAIRY HERD 

Dairying would be a much less complex and 
exacting business if it were not for the constant 
necessity of replacing the cows which for one 
reason or another drop out of the herd. This shift 
and change in the make-up of the working herd is 
much greater than one would expect until one 
considers the various factors involved. 

The cow is fairly long-lived, although not equal- 
ing the horse in this respect. Many cows are still 
useful at thirteen to fifteen years of age. The 
records of registry associations show that an oc- 
casional individual is still bearing young and 
milking up to twenty or more years. The bovine 
wonder of the world so far as age is concerned was 
the cow Old Grannie recorded as No. 1 in the 
Aberdeen-Angus herd-book. She is credited with 
dropping twenty-five calves, the last one in her 
twenty-ninth year and finally dying at the (for 
cows) ripe old age of thirty-six. Probably if it 
were desirable to retain cows to extreme age, many 
would reach a quarter of a century. Nevertheless, 

107 



108 THE COW 

rather careful studies in New York and Minnesota 
covering some thousands of cows indicate that the 
average individual reaches an age of only between 
eight and nine years. This figure does not mean 
that cows die at this average age but rather it 
represents the age at which they are removed from 
the herd. Low-grade beef rather than natural 
death is the fate of most cows. Inasmuch as a 
cow must be at least two years old before she 
"comes in," her actual period of usefulness does 
not average more than seven years. It also means 
that for each seven cows in the herd it will be 
necessary each year to raise at least one calf to 
take their place. There is really a rather rapid 
shift of our bovine population. 

It should be remembered that these estimates 
are the average for a large number of dairies, but 
it does not follow that the same will be true on 
any particular farm. The number of cows re- 
moved from the herd will vaiy widely with cir- 
cumstances and with the policy pursued, but in 
general the more active and enterprising owners 
will have the largest "turn-over" of cows because 
they will be more energetic and persistent in 
culling out undesirable individuals and will not 
wait until a cow reaches extreme age before dis- 
posing of her. 

There are a number of reasons why some 14 per 
cent of our dairy cows must be replaced each year. 
Disease and accident always take their toll, but 



DEPEECIATION" OF THE DAIRY HERD 109 

this is not the most important factor. It has been 
shown by investigations covering several thousand 
cows that the actual annual loss by death was only 
1.2 per cent, and these figures were the same in 
New York and Minnesota. 

Mechanical injury to the teats and udder, such 
as having a teat crushed in the stable by the foot 
of another cow or tearing the udder on a barbed 
wire fence, occasionally leads to the loss of a teat. 
Infective garget is a much more serious trouble, 
nearly always leading to the entire loss of the 
quarters affected. In either case, the dairy use- 
fulness of the animal is diminished and results in 
its disposal for beef. 

Failure to breed or barrenness is very common 
and of course renders the cow valueless except for 
slaughter. 

Probably the largest single cause is poor pro- 
duction, the animal being turned to the butcher 
because she fails to give milk enough to justify her 
existence. It may be added that even more cows 
ought to be eliminated for this same reason. We 
cannot well over-emphasize the slogan that the 
path of the unproductive cow ought to lead 
straight to the butcher's block. 

Finally, there is the question of wearing out 
through old age. A cow really fails largely because 
her teeth become poor and she is handicapped in 
gathering her food at pasture and to a less degree 
in the stable. The teeth of a horse continue to 



110 THE COW 

grow throughout life and the older they are, the 
longer and more protruding they become. Cows 
have front teeth on the lower jaw only and these 
frequently drop out and in other cases are worn 
off to the very roots. It is perhaps not far wrong 
to'say that a cow is no older than her teeth. In 
purchasing a cow of somewhat doubtful age, an 
examination of the mouth is the first necessity. 

The depletion of the herd by death and accidents 
and the necessary eliminations for other reasons 
constitutes an "overhead" charge which is some- 
times forgotten but which is really a most serious 
economic factor. The ultimate end of the cows 
that prove to be failures as producers or that meet 
with some accident or disability is slaughter. 
Dairy-cow beef is so low in price that the value of 
a worn-out or disabled animal is commonly only 
from one-third to one-half of her price if sound. 
Considering all this, it seems certain that in cal- 
culating the balance sheet of a dairy business, it 
will be necessary under the best management to 
"charge off" each year at least 10 per cent exclusive 
of the salvage value of the animals disposed of, a 
depreciation charge much higher than obtains in 
some other types of agriculture. If this estimate 
is wide of the mark, it is at fault in being too low 
rather than too high. 

Broadly speaking, there are two methods of 
maintaining the numbers of the herd> One is 
merely to purchase animals to replace the fallen 




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DEPKECIATION OF THE DAIKY HERD 111 

from time to time as the necessity arises. The 
dairyman who is selling liquid milk and who, 
therefore, has no skim-milk available will often, 
perhaps usually, find this the wisest plan. This is 
especially true if he is located on high-priced land 
and has no rough outlying areas where heifers and 
dry stock may be cheaply pastured. It is emphati- 
cally true, however, that the purchase plan is by 
no means ideal. The buyer will always be asked to 
accept animals which are really the rejects and 
discards of other men. Also, he can never escape 
the danger of buying tuberculosis and epidemic 
abortion together with its sequel, barrenness. He 
stands more than a fair chance of acquiring hard 
milkers and kickers and fence jumpers. He will 
abundantly exemplify the ancient maxim of the 
law, "Let the buyer beware." As an offset to these 
disadvantages is the fact that to rear a calf on 
whole milk and purchased foods and pasture it on 
high-priced lands will almost always cost more 
than to purchase a fresh cow in the markets. The 
only reason why the dairyman so situated should 
raise a calf is the expectation that it will make a 
better cow than he can buy. 

In the vicinity of cities are numerous examples 
of what might be called "high pressure" dairying, 
the cows being bought when new-milch, heavily 
fed and milked and then as soon as they begin to 
take on flesh and diminish in milk yield, they are 
sold for beef and a fresh cow installed in their 



112 THE COW 

place. This plan involves a certain loss as between 
the cost and selling price of every cow handled but, 
on the other hand, it does away with the charge 
involved in feeding and caring for calves and heifer 
and dry cows. 

But after all, for most of us, the true pleasure 
and satisfaction of dairying comes through the 
plan of maintaining the herd by calves born and 
reared on the farm. The dairyman who, like the 
writer, sells cream or who makes butter or ice- 
cream and hence has available an abundance of 
skim-milk, should by all means expect to raise all 
the promising heifer calves. This will of course 
give him more cows than he requires to replenish 
his herd, but there are two marked and distinct 
advantages. There is always an eager market at 
increasing prices for well-bred and well reared 
grade young stock and these, while in a way a sort 
of by-product of the business, may constitute a very 
important addition to the farm revenue. There is 
also the further advantage that, having a large 
number of young cows to select from, he may cull 
his herd more closel}^, retaining only the most de- 
sirable individuals and thus raising the general 
average of production. It ought to be written in 
capital letters that the most important single fac- 
tor in profitable dairying is not breed, feed, meth- 
ods or stable care, but efficient cows. This, to bor- 
row a phrase from Thomas Carlyle, is the "one 
thing altogether indispensable." Even the most 



DEPEECIATION OF THE DAIEY HERD 113 

careful breeding does not secure continuous prog- 
ress and one of the most disheartening facts is that 
not infrequently the offspring is inferior to the 
dam. The man who has heifers of his own breeding 
in considerable numbers stands the best chance of 
maintaining a high average excellency. 

It has been noted in an earlier chapter that suc- 
cess or failure in dairying does not depend on the 
selection of any particular breed. Both experience 
and theoiy indicate that real constructive dairy 
improvement must come through the use of pure- 
bred sires and that, having chosen one breed, a 
stockman must stick to it consecutively through 
the years. He will soon have a herd of grades, the 
first cross being commonly stated as one-half 
pure-bred, the next one as three-fourths pure-bred, 
and so on. Four or five successive crosses with 
males of the same breed rapidly reduce the pro- 
portion of native blood to an insignificant fraction 
and will result in a herd which in color, size, gen- 
eral appearance and real dairy usefulness will be 
the equivalent of a registered herd, the main dif- 
ference being that they can never have their names 
written in any herd-book nor can they be sold at 
prices approaching that of registered stock. 

It may be asked whether there is any funda- 
mental reason other than sentiment for the use 
of the pure-bred sire rather than the mongrel, that 
is, the animal of mixed or promiscuous breeding. 
The whole value of a sire depends on his ability 



114 THE COW 

to transmit his characters to his offspring. To 
this power the biologist gives the name "pre- 
potency." This power or ability Taries greatly in 
different individuals and the history of breeding 
is really a chronicle of the influence of certain 
famous sires who have been prepotent to an un- 
usual degree. It would be easy to multiply classi- 
cal examples of this fact. There is the Jersey bull, 
Stoke Pogis 3d, sacrificed for beef while still young 
before his value was realized, yet it is said that 
every daughter of his that ever was tested made a 
record that would have entitled her to admission 
to the Jersey Kegister of Merit. There is the 
stallion Hambletonian 10 who, during a period of 
twenty-one years, was the progenitor of 1287 foals, 
a large percentage of which were notably fast. 
This was true not only of Hambletonian himself 
but of his sons as well, so that by common consent 
he stands unapproached as the foremost horse in 
the history of the American trotter. 

It is this mysterious quality of prepotency that 
above everything else is to be desired in the sire. 
Unfortunately not every pure-bred animal pos- 
sesses it, but there is abundant evidence to show 
that the animal which for a long period has been 
bred within certain blood lines without admixture 
of diverse strains is more likely to be prepotent. 
On the other hand, the cross-bred or native or 
mongrel may be and frequently is of excellent in- 
dividuality, but they are surely much less likely 



DEPEECIATION OF THE DAIEY HEED 115 

to be able to transmit these good qualities to their 
offspring. 

Not every dairyman need expect to become a 
breeder of registered cattle. Indeed, after many 
years of agitation and propaganda, less than 2 per 
cent of the dairy cows of the eastern United States 
are pure-bred. However, every dairyman who ex- 
pects to rear calves to replenish his herd ought 
either to own or else pay the service fee of a good 
pure-bred sire. While a certain rather small per- 
centage of bull calves of fashionable breeding and 
bom of dams who have been admitted to "Advanced 
Eegistry," that is, dams whose high production has 
been officially demonstrated and certified, sell at 
high prices, plenty of calves of excellent breeding, 
especially when owned by the less widely known 
breeders, can be purchased at prices quite within 
the reach of any dairyman. 



XII 

THE JUDGING OF COWS 

A VERY eminent teacher of animal industry has 
said that he could learn more about a cow by 
weighing her milk for a week and testing it with 
the Babcock test than he could by a life-long ex- 
amination of her according to any scale of points — 
a conclusion in which any good dairyman will 
heartily concur. But on the other hand, we may 
not always be able to weigh and test her milk and, 
moreover, there are certain accepted standards of 
beauty and form in cattle, certain requirements as 
to individuality insisted on in the show-ring and 
the sales pavilion. No matter how much attention 
is paid to official testing, we shall never cease to 
exhibit cattle for prizes at the fairs and always 
our agricultural college boys will continue to or- 
ganize judging teams to compete in the art of 
placing animals according to certain agreed stand- 
ards of form, color, carriage, qualities of udder 
and skin and hoof and horn. This judging and 
scoring of animals is a fine art and one that de- 
serves to be encouraged by lovers of good live-stock 
and by our teachers of animal husbandry. It is 

116 



THE JUDGING OF COWS 117 

true that the price at which dairy cows sell depends 
largely on their Advanced Registry certificate, i.e., 
the officially certified records as to their ability to 
produce pounds of milk and butter-fat. It is also 
true, however, that really high prices will never 
be paid for cows that carry misshapen udders and 
sloping rumps and winged shoulders. In other 
words, men who love cattle demand not only ability 
to give high production but good individuality as 
well. 

There are two different ideals in judging cattle. 
Unfortunately, almost every breed at some period 
of its development has suffered because the men 
setting breed fashions have followed some per- 
sonal fancy or fad or character which had no par- 
ticular connection with usefulness, dairy efficiency 
or beauty. For example, not so long ago Jersey 
breeders laid great stress on the importance of 
solid color together with a black switch and tongue 
characters that can have no possible relation to 
dairy temperament or capacity. Judging cattle 
according to merely fanciful standards or points 
that have no bearing on the question of production 
is very superficial. Fortunately, on the whole, 
there is less of this judging than there was at an 
earlier period of the pure-bred business. 

On the other hand, as representing the seasoned 
experience and observation of many handlers and 
students of dairy cows, there has come a substan- 
tial agreement concerning certain external charac- 



118 THE COW 

ters to be determined not only by the eye but quite 
as much by the touch, which are the usual (but 
by no means invariable) indications of dairy tem- 
perament and capacity. 

Every breed association has adopted its own 
official score-card or scale of points. These will 
vary one from the other in minor questions of 
coloration, shape of horns, quality of coat and 
other non-essentials, but in fundamentals they are 
very much alike, showing that the scoring of cattle 
is more than a mere empirical art. The score-card 
is very useful to the student or judge because it 
brings the various qualities of the animal to his 
attention in an orderly and systematic sequence. 
The reader will find it very interesting to study 
the official scale of points of any of the dairy cattle 
registry associations or the card prepared for the 
use of students by our animal husbandry teachers 
in the agricultural colleges, but these occupy too 
much space to be reproduced here. It will be 
noted that there has grown up a fairly large half- 
technical half -slangy vocabulary of the judging 
ring. 

In judging dairy cattle, one point universally 
emphasized is that the cow (and to a less extent 
the bull or calf) should show the wedge shape or, 
as it is sometimes put, the "double wedge form." 
This means that the hind quarters, or more strictly 
the pelvic arch, should be relatively broader and 
more massive than the chest. This conception may 



THE JUDGING OF COWS 119 

be visualized thus: If imaginary lines are drawn 
from the extreme outside points of the hip-bones to 
the outside points of the shoulders and then con- 
tinued forward, they should meet at a point some 
little distance in front. The same is true of lines 
along the spine and belly, although it will be under- 
stood that this can hardly be demonstrated with 
the exactness of a problem in Euclid. Let it be 
said, however, in the most emphatic manner that 
a good cow is wedge-shaped not because she is 
narrow in front but because she is broad behind. 
The distinction is most fundamental. If the wedge 
shape is secured only at the expense of a restricted 
heart and lung cavity, it is all wrong. A roomy, 
wide-spread pelvis is necessary to shelter the or- 
gans of reproduction and to give easy room for 
the attachment of a capacious udder. This udder 
cannot be easily swung if the cow has thighs like 
a beef steer, hence we look for "cat hams" and an 
animal "high in the twist." 

Most score-cards ask for a cow with a back "level 
from the point of the withers to the setting on 
of the tail-head," or similar phrasing. This means 
that a sloping rump is not desirable. This is per- 
haps a rather "fancy" point but a sloping rump is 
very often correlated with an udder hung too far 
forward and with poor rear udder development. 

A cow "down in the back" or "sway -backed" is 
undesirable from the viewpoint of beauty or sym- 
metry and it is always preferable to have the back 



120 THE COW 

level ; yet it must be admitted that this particular 
fault seems to be veiy common in cows of marked 
excellence. There may be a special reason for this 
because a great abdomen and a heavy udder, both 
so necessary for a good cow, tend to put a down- 
ward curve in the spine, especially with advancing 
years. In this case the popular "good top line" 
and real dairy performance may be to some ex- 
tent antagonistic. 

The ribs should be well sprung, giving a barrel- 
shaped chest and enormous abdomen, because if a 
cow is really to be a high producer she must first 
of all have a great stomach that can hold and digest 
large amounts of bulky food. This reminds one 
of Napoleon's famous dictum regarding the com- 
mon soldier, "Away with brains. Give me guts." 

The withers should be rather thin and sharp, the 
very opposite of the beef type. Heavy withers are 
usually correlated with a thick hard hide, a heavy 
tail and a generally beefy conformation. The 
vertebrse should be large and prominent to the 
touch, showing mainly that they are not padded 
and covered with fatty tissue. Stripped of their 
flesh, the skeletons of the milch cow and the typical 
beef cow can hardly be distinguished by the best 
trained anatomist, but the dairy cow is more in- 
clined to be "raw-boned" because she puts her fat 
in the pail instead of using it to upholster her 
framework. 

We must shun the hard, thick, inelastic hide, for 



THE JUDGING OF COWS 121 

there is no worse indication. The skin need not 
be especially thin but it must be "mellow" to the 
touch, elastic and loose, so that behind the shoul- 
ders one may pick up a handful of it. This quality 
of being a "good handler" has always been a much 
esteemed character and the word was used by 
writers more than a century ago. Some judges 
place much emphasis on the color and abundance 
of the "secretions," meaning thereby the oily mat- 
ter in the skin, the waxy material within the ear 
and the yellow dandruff at the roots of the long 
hairs in the tail. Most cows who give even small 
amounts of very rich milk are likely to exhibit 
these indications in a marked degree. Desirable 
characters are a bright, active, prominent eye, a 
lively ear, a great broad muzzle and powerful jaw, 
a horn not too heavy, and always an air of supple 
slenderness which we call feminine as opposed to 
the rugged masculinity of the bull. 

There remains the udder, to which more points 
are given and on which more stress is laid than on 
any other one feature. It must be acknowledged 
that some cows which are excellent dairy animals 
from the standpoint of production nevertheless 
carry miserably misshapen udders, but this is their 
misfortune. A beautiful symmetrical udder is a 
point worth striving after. It should be "square," 
with the four teats wide apart but not "strutting.'* 
It should be attached far up between the thighs 
behind and yet be carried far forward under the 



132 THE COW 

belly also. It should be "buttoned up close" to 
the abdomen and not swinging or pendulous, else 
it will chafe and be more liable to mechanical 
injury. It should be soft and very elastic, covered 
with silky hair and should fall into loose folds of 
skin when empty. 

The milk veins have perhaps received undue 
attention, many holding that these are the one 
unmistakable sign of a good cow. We like to see 
them long and crooked and if possible divided into 
two or three branches, entering the abdomen 
through as many different holes or "milk wells." 
It is at least a reasonable assumption that the size 
of these veins is a measure of the circulatory ac- 
tivity of the udder and if so they should be a sort 
of measure of daiiy capacity. They may be traced 
out on a very much smaller scale in bulls also and 
in this case are given considerable value. Some 
poor cows have prominent milk veins, but most 
inferior ones do not, and nearly all animals of 
unusual capacity will exhibit marked development 
in this regard. 

The question may be fairly asked: "How much 
connection is there between conformation and per- 
formance and to what extent are these supposed 
indications of dairy excellence really borne out by 
the hard test of the milk scales and the Babcock 
bottle?" The writer has been intimately associ- 
ated with the care of a herd for many years. He 
has done some buying and selling and some show- 



THE JUDGING OF COWS 123 

ring judging and has tried to determine how far 
there is a real relation between a cow's conforma- 
tion and her ability to produce. His conclusions 
are as follows : Some cows, too many, in fact, pos- 
sess every external character that is supposed to 
indicate the superior dairy animal and yet seem 
unable to "deliver the goods." They are calculated 
to deceive the very elect. Something they lack, be 
it constitution or vigor or pep or whatever term 
you choose to employ. On the other hand, he has 
yet to see the cow of beefy build, hard, thick inelas- 
tic hide, heavy hams, thick withers, bull-headed, 
with a tucked up little udder and small, inconspic- 
uous milk veins buried in tissue that by any 
stretch of courtesy can be called a superior dairy 
animal. Emphatically, dairy indications are more 
than skin deep. We hold to the ecclesiastical doc- 
trine that "there are outward signs of inward 
grace." 



XIII 
THE DAIRY FARMSTEAD 

In the business of dairying three principal fac- 
tors and items of investment are to be considered, 
— the land, the barns and the herd. 

So far as the land is concerned, it has already- 
been noted that dairying is commonly a hill- 
country business. Of course this does not mean 
that cow-keeping is restricted to this type of 
country or that the very best land may not be 
employed profitably in dairying. It indicates that 
much land too rough and hilly to be well adapted 
to the production of staple cash crops may be very 
well utilized in dairying and hence that industry 
has largely gone to the rougher and cheaper areas. 
On the other hand, one must not make the mistake 
of concluding that the cow is adapted to very poor 
land. She can make good use of steep and rocky 
pastures if they are reasonably fertile and clothed 
with grass, but light, poor, sandy soils, if they are 
worth trying to utilize at all, had better be given 
over to sheep. Experience in the range country of 
the West with a very scanty rainfall shows that 
on these lands the beef steer rather than the dairy 

124 



THE DAIRY FARMSTEAD 125 

COW gives the best results. Also the dairy farm 
must have something besides rocky pastures. 
There must be stretches of meadow and areas 
adapted to corn for, as a rule, the man who at- 
tempts dairying as his main business without the 
aid of the com plant will be almost hopelessly 
handicapped from the beginning. There are cer- 
tain exceptions to this general statement. Some 
regions are either so far north or else lie so far 
above sea-level that the seasons are too short and 
cool for this heat-loving plant, and yet our native 
grasses are most thoroughly at home. In these 
localities, one may find a highly developed dairy 
industry without the silo. 

It should be borne in mind that the cow can 
utilize steep and rocky hillsides to advantage only 
in conjunction with corresponding areas of land 
that are fairly free of stone and level enough to 
permit the use of modern agricultural machinery. 
Fortunately this is just the condition which ob- 
tains on many of the farms in the Hill-Country of 
the northeastern states. 

It is, of course, utterly impossible to lay down 
any scheme of crop rotation that will fit all sections 
of the country or that will apply to every farm in 
any particular locality. Indeed, every farm con- 
stitutes a separate problem in farm management. 
It is equally impossible to say how many cows 
ought to be maintained on a farm of any given size 
because this will vary through the very widest 



126 THE COW 

limits. It may be practicable under skilled and in- 
tensive agriculture on the best lands (especially if 
far enough south so that some double-cropping 
may be practiced) to approximate one cow for each 
acre of arable land, although this will imply the 
purchase of a large part of the grain food. In most 
of the dairy regions of the northeastern United 
States, a cow for each three to five acres will be a 
much more reliable and conservative estimate, 

It is perhaps foolish to specify any farm, real or 
imaginary, and lay down a hard and fast system 
of rotation and cropping. All schemes of this 
character must be more or less elastic. However, 
as a sort of working hypothesis, we may imagine a 
farm somewhere in the dairy belt containing one 
hundred acres of cleared land. We will assume 
that fifty acres of this area are too steep and rocky 
to be tillable and hence must be used as permanent 
pasture. The remaining fifty acres are level and 
smooth enough and have sufficient fertility to 
make good meadow or to grow com. How many 
dairy cow^s such a farm will support will depend 
very largely on the character and agricultural 
condition of the soil and on the skill and energy 
of the owner. Nevertheless, there is something 
like an average farm and average efficiency in 
management and, bearing this in mind, we may 
venture to make some estimates as to the produc- 
tivity of this farm. 

Suppose we see whether this farm is fitted to 



THE DAIEY FAEMSTEAD 137 

provide at least the roughage for twenty milking 
cows together with the young stock and necessary 
horses. The farm stock will then comprise twenty 
cows, a bull, five yearling heifers, five calves and 
three or four horses. 

The fifty acres of permanent pasture, if it is 
fairly good, ought to provide the larger part of 
the grazing required during the pasture periods, 
which is only a little more than five months. 
Later in the season we may supplement the old 
pastures by allowing the cows to graze off some 
of the aftermath in the meadows. The temptation 
will be to overdo this because, while rather hard 
on the meadows, it is excellent for the cows. 

Corn silage is one of the very best and cheapest 
of cow forages and should fill a large place in the 
yearly menu, A cow will profitably use forty 
pounds of silage a day and this amount will very 
satisfactorily replace ten or twelve pounds of good 
hay. This means four tons of silage to a cow for 
the 200 days that she must depend mainly on stable 
feeding. Some silage should supplement the sum- 
mer pastures in dry weather or late in the season, 
say a ton to a cow for this purpose, which will 
mean that one can feed liberally, if necessary, for 
six weeks or two months. It may be said in pass- 
ing that a supply of silage for summer is far su- 
perior to any scheme of growing green crops to 
help out scanty pastures. One would better ar- 
range for five tons of silage for each cow and some 



138 THE COW 

for the heifers and even for the calves. A round 
silo thirty feet high and sixteen feet in diameter 
if well filled will hold about 120 tons, and this 
will be about what is required in our scheme of 
dairy management. 

A good farmer ought to produce twelve tons of 
silage to the acre on the average, so at least ten 
acres of corn should be planted. This corn will 
always be grown by plowing up ten acres of the 
oldest and poorest meadow and it will always be 
followed by oats. Our farm rotation map appears 
about as follows : 

50 acres permanent pasture 

10 acres corn 

10 acres oats 

30 acres hay 

The amount of com required is really the key 
to the whole scheme. If a larger proportion of the 
farm were tillable, we would have less pasture and 
more crops. 

The ten acres of oats can hardly be expected to 
yield more than 500 bushels and this will be far 
above the average of the country, but fortunately 
dairy farms generally yield more than average 
crops. After we have fed the horses and poultry 
and saved oats for seed, there will not be many left 
for the cows. In other words, we must expect to 
buy most of the grain feed. 

The thirty acres of hay (the ten acres of new 
seeding being mostly clover) ought to give forty- 



THE DAIRY FARMSTEAD 129 

five tons of Jiay. This will be enough for the horses 
and cattle, supplemented as it is by silage. 

This is a sort of empirical made-on-paper scheme 
but it is at least the outline of a cropping system 
which is fundamentally sound and which will work 
out well in the dairy belt of the northeastern 
states. At the same time it may be greatly modi- 
fied. If the farm is so fortunate as to lie in the 
limestone country where alfalfa is at home, the 
area of meadow may be reduced and two crops of 
oats may be grown in succession before re-seeding. 
If this is done it will double our acreage of oats 
and we may expect to have enough to help out con- 
siderably in making up the grain ration. Some- 
times if hay is scarce, an acre or two of very rich 
land sown to millet and cured for hay may take 
the place of two or three times that area of ordi- 
nary meadow. It may be the wisest plan to follow 
the practice of some dairymen who have found that 
the easiest way to grow grain is to plant potatoes 
and exchange them for mill feed. 

In a general way over most of the dairy belt of 
the United States, the business is founded on three 
great crops, (1) grass and the hay legumes (alfalfa 
and the clovers), (2) corn to be harvested mainly 
through the silo, (3) and a small-grain crop, oats, 
or better, a mixture of oats, barley and peas sown 
together. 

It must not be forgotten that the largest single 
factor in crop production is the weather. There 



130 THE COW 

ought to be a margin of safety between what the 
live-stock requires and what the farm will ordi- 
narily produce. The effort to keep all the cattle 
that the farm can maintain in ordinarily produc- 
tive years will be sure to meet with lean years when 
our plans go wrong. It will be well to carry over 
from year to year some reserve of hay and not 
to keep so much stock that choice timothy hay 
cannot be sold, for its sale value is always far 
above its feeding worth. 

The choice of a farm is exceedingly important 
and many factors must be considered. Some of 
these are as follows : 

The soil: Is it fertile? Has it natural sup- 
plies of lime sufficient to make it easy to grow 
legumes, especially clovers and alfalfa? Has it 
the physical characters that adapt it to the true 
grasses? Does it need artificial drainage? Is it 
free from large stone so as to permit the use of 
modern tillage implements? Is there at least a 
part of it where the corn plant will be at home? 

Topography: How much of the land is level 
enough to permit the use of the tractor and other 
heavy implements and to allow inter-cultural til- 
lage without washing and denuding? Does it slope 
south and east or does it face north and west? 
The difference in the two exposures is very impor- 
tant. Does the tillable land where we expect to 
grow corn enjoy good air drainage so that there 
will not be frosty pockets? This may not be vital 



THE DAIRY FARMSTEAD 131 

in the South but it is important as we approach 
the northern limit of the corn-belt. What is the 
position of the buildings? Are there favorable 
grades for roads to bring the crops to the barn and, 
not less important, return the manure to the fields? 
Is the farm cut up with ravines or streams that 
will interfere with broad fields and long straight 
furrows? Is it possible to reach remote parts of 
the farm by direct routes? Is the house and barn 
sheltered from winter gales? 

Climate : What is the annual rainfall of the 
locality? How is it distributed as to the seasons of 
the year? What is the date of the last frost in 
spring and the first frost in the fall? What is the 
mean annual temperature? 

Location, markets, transportation: Is the farm 
near good permanent stone highways? Is it near, 
if possible, veiy near, the markets where the dairy 
products are to be marketed? Is it near the sta- 
tion from which feed supplies must be hauled? 
Are the market roads level enough so that maxi- 
mum loads may be taken? 

Water supply: Has the farm a satisfactory- 
water supply in the pastures as well as at the house 
and barn? If not, is it possible to secure an abun- 
dant supply of pure running water at reasonable 
expense? Are there springs or unfailing streams 
in the pastures? We cannot lay too much emphasis 
on this. 

Social and human factors: Are the neighbors 



132 THE COW 

of the type and nationality that we wish our chil- 
dren to grow up among? Is there a good school? 
Is there a live church? Is there a community 
conscience and consciousness? Is there a good 
sized village or small city within easy driving dis- 
tance by automobile? These may be intangible 
factors not easily translated into terms of dollars, 
but we cannot afford to ignore them. A man who 
buys a farm chooses a home not only for himself 
but, it is to be hoped, for his descendants as well. 
Broad and smiling acres and barns that burst with 

crops avail little if the human conditions are 
wrong. 

A man must choose a farm not only as a place 
where cows may be maintained and milk cheaply 
produced and advantageously marketed but also 
as a place where he may help rear a worthy agri- 
cultural civilization and found an enduring and 
contented family life. 



XIV 

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE DAIRY BARN 

We may have a herd of excellent cattle and a 
good farm but if the barns are inconvenient or 
poorly adapted to their purpose, the entire business 
will be unsatisfactory and perhaps unprofitable. 
Satisfactory barns are rarely made in an archi- 
tect's office. They grow under the hand of the man 
who really knows the routine of harvesting crops 
and caring for cows. The country, especially near 
large cities, is full of so-called model farms with 
very expensive and sometimes very artistic barns, 
but most of them are models only of how barns 
ought not to be constructed. Under the most 
favorable conditions, doing the chores calls for a 
rather appalling expenditure of time and energy, 
but a poorly planned bam and stable may easily 
double the labor. It should be said in passing that 
farming is about the only business in the world 
at which rich men deliberately play without pre- 
tension that there should be a connection between 
income and outgo. Many of these model bams 
load every cow with an overhead charge for her 
shelter which, if really charged against the busi- 

133 



134 THE COW 

ness, would effectually dispose of any possibility 
of profit. 

As for the cow herself, her esthetic sense is en- 
tirely undeveloped. Some few fundamental condi- 
tions she enjoys and her welfare demands that as 
far as possible these should be supplied. Her 
stable should be well lighted, well ventilated, 
reasonably warm and the stall should be bedded 
and so arranged that she may stand or lie with 
comfort. But she cannot appreciate the sanitary 
gleam of white tile nor the elegance of nickeled 
stall fittings. Concrete floors and foundation, and 
hemlock construction above suit her perfectly. 

If a man is making plenty of money in some 
other business and spending it on a farm, there is 
nothing to forbid him erecting a barn ornate 
enough to gratify his heart's desire. There are 
also some breeders handling valuable herds who 
have many visitors and purchasers and beautiful 
and expensive stables may have an advertising 
value that justifies the cost. However, dairying as 
a whole is a severely utilitarian business where 
the margin of profit is small. The barn and stables 
at best are large and important items of capital 
expenditure and the business demands as low cost 
as is consistent with convenience and the comfort 
and hygienic welfare of the occupants. It should 
be noted that the convenience of the barn and the 
welfare of the cattle do not necessarily go together. 
There are barns in which it is easy to feed and care 



THE DAIRY BAEN 135 

for the cows but where not enough attention has 
been paid to ventilation, lighting and comfortable 
stalls. More commonly, especially in the preten- 
tious barn, the welfare of the cattle has been looked 
after, but that of the herdsman forgotten. One 
finds hay dragged long distances by the forkful 
through narrow alleys, silage carried in baskets 
from remote corners and manure laboriously re- 
moved by wheelbarrows. 

A fairly standard type of dairy barn construc- 
tion has now been evolved. It is a building from 
thirty-two to thirty-six feet wide and as long as 
necessary to house the desired number of cattle. 
The cows stand in stanchions in two parallel 
rows facing outward toward the air and light and 
feeding alleys and there will be a driveway through 
the center behind them through which a wagon may 
be driven or a carrier rolled for the removal of the 
manure. These general dimensions are correct. 
A barn narrower than this will be crowded and if 
wider it will be poor economy of space. 

The arrangement of floor plan just indicated 
will be best in most cases. However, under the 
rather unusual circumstances when it is expected 
that the cows will rely mainly on green soiling 
crops fed in the stables, it may be wiser to reverse 
the position of the cows and have them stand 
facing each other so that loads of forage may be 
driven through the central feeding alley and 
pitched directly into the mangers. It must be 



136 THE COW 

repeated, however, that this arrangement is not 
good so far as light, ventilation and clean stable 
walls are concerned, and if employed at all it must 
be in cases in which soiling is to be a very impor- 
tant part of farm practice. Outside of these rather 
fixed dimensions and somewhat fundamental plans, 
the details may vary to suit the wishes or special 
needs of the owner, but never under any circum- 
stances forgetting the convenience in following the 
routine of caring for the herd. 

A great variety of methods and devices for stalls 
for the cattle has been advised and patented and 
used to some extent, but practically all experienced 
herdsmen now agree that some form of swinging 
iron stanchion is the best solution of the problem. 
These stanchions should be hung with a short chain 
at top and bottom so as to allow the cow a certain 
degree of freedom and liberty of movement. Each 
cow will need floor space from thirty-six to forty- 
two inches in width and there should be about four 
and one-half feet from the manger to the gutter 
or drop, varying with the size of the cow. Various 
firms are engaged in the business of supplying 
fittings for cow stables and these carry a very ex- 
tensive line comprising almost everything that can 
be suggested. Such manufacturers are glad to 
furnish detailed plans and to make estimates of 
cost. 

Stables, even when rigid economy is sought, 
should be constructed with manger, gutters and 



THE DAIRY BARN 137 

floors of concrete on the score of permanency, sani- 
tation and even of first cost. There are many 
places about the stable where wood is short-lived 
and unsatisfactory at best. 

In addition to the regular stabling for the milk- 
ing herd, a liberal number of box-stalls should be 
provided that may be used as quarters for cows 
about to drop calves or for exceptionally good 
animals to which it is desired to give special atten- 
tion. These stalls may also be utilized as calf pens. 
Such stalls and pens may be inexpensively con- 
structed of wood, or, if means permit, they may 
be purchased ready to erect from dealers. Iron 
box-stalls are rather high in first cost, but they 
have many advantages in the way of neatness and 
durability. 

Hay-mows should be provided above the stable 
and the hay dropped down through chutes directly 
into the feeding alleys. Most professional archi- 
tects and sanitarians will not approve of this ar- 
rangement, but any one who has really served his 
apprenticeship around a bam will understand the 
simplicity and labor-saving advantages of the 
plan. Moreover, the objections are on the whole 
theoretical. 

Light should be provided in abundance, the only 
limit being that in cold weather a single thickness 
of glass allows heat to be lost very rapidly and, as 
will be emphasized later, this is serious in severe 
climates. 



138 THE COW 

The best ventilation will be secured by a system 
of intake and outtake air flues, the latter extending 
from a point near the floor and carried up through 
the upper stories to a point well above the ridge 
of th^ roof. This general plan has been rather 
widely popularized under the name of the "King 
system." It should be said that the system is 
rather expensive to install. Like fire-place chim- 
neys, they have sometimes failed to act as expected, 
the draught being in the wrong direction. An- 
other plan very widely used on account of sim- 
plicity and low first cost is merely to replace some 
of the windows with ordinary cotton muslin. This 
admits some light and also allows the air to filter 
slowly through while avoiding strong direct 
draughts. 

If possible, a stable should be built warm enough 
so that it will never freeze even in the coldest 
weather. This is not entirely on account of the cow 
herself, because she is a native of rather cold 
climates and is probably less sensitive to low tem- 
peratures than we sometimes think. However, no 
item of stable comfort is more important than 
individual water basins for each cow so that she 
may help herself at any time of day or night; but 
this very desirable arrangement is forbidden unless 
the stable is entirely frostless. Freezing once or 
twice during the winter will ruin the whole system 
by bursting pipes and water basins. A stable must 
be very warmly constructed to remain above freez- 



THE DAIKY BAEN 139 

ing during a midwinter night when it is twenty 
below zero outside and a howling gale driving in 
its frigid blast at every crack and nail-hole. The 
side walls must be double with a good dead air 
space, or better yet, a chaff or saw-dust packing, 
and over head there should be a hay-mow. In ad- 
dition, the ceiling should be fairly low and the 
stable filled with cows. The writer, living on the 
high lands of the central New York plateau with 
a rather iron-clad winter climate, realizes how 
much care is necessary to secure a stable in which 
water buckets may be installed with safety. 

Always in planning a barn there will be many 
details to consider. Silage is heavy and must be 
handled in large quantities. Therefore, it is of 
prime importance to have the .silos so located that 
the contents will be thrown out as near as possible 
to the feeding mangers. 

Very often it will be wisest to have the barn 
built in the T or L form, the main part containing 
the lines of stanchions for the milking herd, while 
the wing may be devoted to .box-stalls and calf 
pens and perhaps with quarters for horses. How- 
ever, city milk inspectors do not approve of the 
very convenient feature of having the farm teams 
close to the cows. 

When the slope of the land permits, the "over 
shot" type of bam with the main drive-way on the 
second story has many advantages. The barn of 
the writer has the rather unusual feature of the 



140 THE COW 

drive-way on the third story, but this construction 
is not usually practical unless a fairly steep hill- 
side is available to help gain entrance. As far as 
possible the mows should be kept clear of all cross 
timbers that interfere with the free use of grappel 
horse-forks or slings in unloading hay or un- 
threshed grain. 

The so-called "gambrel" or "hip" roof gives 
much more overhead storage room than the usual 
gable type and at a relatively small increased cost. 
Even when economy is very necessary, a first-class 
metal roof or perhaps even better, a slate roof, will 
be cheapest in the end. It may be added that a 
system of lightning-rods properly installed ought 
to enable the dairyman to rest better during 
thunder-showers. 



XV 

CONCERNING DAIRYING AS A BUSINESS 

The writer lives on an old farm in the Hill-Coun- 
try of eastern New York just where the western 
foothills of the Catskills merge themselves with the 
central New York plateau. We have been farm- 
ers on this land since 1800, It is a farm that, 
judged by corn-belt standards, is too hilly and 
stone-strewn for easy or successful farming. It is 
a farm where the side-hill plow will always find 
a place and there are many fields from which the 
tractor and hay-loader will be forever barred. But 
the hills are good hills nevertheless, great furrows 
from the glacial plow, and the bowlder-clay and 
limestone drift of which they are composed make 
a soil where grass and alfalfa and oats are much 
at home. The farm lies high above sea level and 
we do not grow corn as easily as if we were a 
thousand feet lower or a few hundred miles further 
south. More and more with the years we and all 
our neighbors are discovering that we belong in 
the dairy belt and that our best agricultural oppor- 
tunity lies in the keeping of cows. From earliest 
boyhood my farm activities have been linked with 

141 



143 THE COW 

the dairy herd. The daily yield of cream consti- 
tutes the means by which we live, so I have in mind 
to set down very briefly my philosophy, my stead- 
fast faith, concerning the business of cow-keeping. 

Let it be said first that dairying is surely no 
sluggard's job. In all the devious ways by land 
or sea, in shop or mart or roaring city canyon by 
which men gain a livelihood, there is none other 
occupation so insistent, so exacting in its demands. 
Like Tennyson's brook, it goes on forever. There 
is something almost appalling or pitiful in its 
unending routine. I remember how my good father, 
noting this fact, used to quote, half humorously, 
half seriously, the phrase of Solomon the Wise, 
"For there is no discharge in this war." It is 
almost as regular and unchanging as the Proces- 
sion of the Equinoxes. Come what may, though 
the heavens fall, the cow demands her usual atten- 
tion. The day that the master of the farm dies, 
she must be fed and milked. On the great day 
when the daughter of the home is given in mar- 
riage, there can be no deviation. The fruit-grower 
or the crop farmer may labor hard but on Saturday 
night he may forget his task till Monday dawn. 
There are many dairy farms where the irreducible 
minimum of Sunday chores will constitute more 
than the eight-hour day which union labor insists 
leaves not enough time for rest and play. We 
cherish a family tradition that for more than a 
century there has never been a night when in our 



DAIRYING AS A BUSINESS 143 

house there was not a fire on the hearth and a 
light in the window, but the reason is that the 
exigencies of our business were such that never 
under any circumstances could the plant close 
down. 

Dairying is in no way a get-rich-quick proposi- 
tion. There are certain types of farming, like fruit- 
growing and vegetable-gardening, in which the 
possible value of production to the acre is very 
large and where a fortunate conjunction of good 
yields and high prices sometimes give the farmer 
returns that constitute the financial romance of 
agriculture. For example, it is possible to find in- 
stances in which peaches or onions or strawberries 
or lettuce have given gross returns of more than a 
thousand dollars from single acres. Nothing of 
this nature can ever come about from the sale of 
dairy products. Intelligently and industriously 
followed, the business ought generally to yield a 
profit, but the margin above cost of production will 
never be very large. The breeding of registered 
cattle and the exploitation of the pure-bred busi- 
ness is very different. This calls for judgment and 
skill of a very high order together with a certain 
gift of salesmanship and a full appreciation of the 
value of publicity. Some few men of great energy 
and special ability have made money very rapidly 
in this field. Selling market milk or butter or 
cheese will never afford a foundation for any agri- 
cultural wonder-tales. 



144 THE COW 

Another weakness of the milk business from a 
commercial standpoint is the fact that the product 
must be sold as rapidly as produced and that once 
production is under way it cannot be arrested 
quickly to conform to the demands of a falling 
market. By aid of cold storage, butter and cheese 
and other milk products may be held for some 
months in good condition, but market milk must 
find its final market within twenty-four hours of 
its production. Save in a few special cases, the 
dairyman has ceased to be a manufacturer and 
has become merely a producer of raw materials. 
While theoretically at least the very perishable 
nature of his product has left the dairyman at the 
mercy of the dealer and manufacturer, yet as a 
matter of fact the demoralization of the milk mar- 
ket never approaches that sometimes experienced 
in fruits and truck. 

One of the advantages of the dairy business is 
its stability. The dairyman is never caught up to 
new and undreamed-of heights of prosperity. It 
is probable that through a series of years no 
other agricultural product shows a curve of prices 
so regular or so closely estimated in advance. The 
rise and fall of dairy prices, with certain minor 
variations, is almost as regular as the seasons. 
Always the lowest prices of the year come in April, 
May and June, then start to advance and reach 
the peak in November and then begin an orderly 
decline to the low point again in April. No man 



DAIRYING AS A BUSINESS 145 

can possibly make even an intelligent guess as to 
the price of potatoes or apples or cabbage or onions 
a year from now, but we are fairly safe in saying 
that the price of dairy products will not vary 
greatly from the average of past seasons or from 
the general average price level of all commodities. 
This enables the dairyman to plan for the future 
with an assurance that is hardly allowed in other 
farm business. Even in the midst of industrial 
panics and crumbling prices such as has come to 
us in the wake of the Great War, his products have 
exhibited relative price stability. 

There is a certain element of safety and security 
in our business. The dairy specialist may produce 
only one product, but he is surely not a one-crop 
farmer. Surplus supplies of hay are readily car- 
ried over from one year to another and almost 
never do we have a failure of all the crops of the 
dairy farm. 

The greatest argument for the business of cow- 
keeping is that above any other type of agriculture 
it makes for soil enrichment. In America we have 
developed a remarkable agriculture and have made 
our typical farmer efficient beyond any other in 
the world. No other tiller of the soil anywhere 
produces as much food to a man (not to the acre) 
as does the American husbandman. We have also 
succeeded in wringing wealth from the soil as the 
development and resources of the agricultural 
states attest. However, we have not yet demon- 



146 THE COW 

strated that our kind of agriculture can endure 
through many centuries. The good dairyman need 
have no doubts or misgivings on that score. If he 
carefully conserves all the manure and puts it on 
the fields and supplements his home-grown rough- 
age with purchased concentrates, he may go for- 
ward in the calm assurance that where he keeps 
cows today he may keep still more cows in days to 
come. He will have the satisfaction of knowing 
that he will "leave the soil better than he found it" 
and he will be able to hand down to his children 
an ever richer heritage. 

There remains at least one more consideration 
and it is a rather intangible one. Somehow or 
other it cannot be gainsaid that dairying makes 
for agricultural and community stability. Farm 
tenantry is in many of its aspects unfortunate and 
a menace to our ideal country-side development. 
The typical tenant has no real abiding place and 
he makes a crop and then moves on, seeking new 
fields of adventure. When a man acquires flocks 
and herds, he begins to strike root in the soil. 

The relative permanency of dairying, the all-the- 
year-round character of the industry, the regularity 
of it, the high intelligence which it demands and 
the increasing value and productivity of dairy 
farms are all factors that give special dairy com- 
munities the best developments of our rural life. 



DAIRYING AS A BUSINESS 147 

It is mid-July. Once again we are making the 
hay on Hillside Farm. In the matter of hay, it is a 
fat year. I hardly know where we shall store the 
first crop, to say nothing of the aftermath. It is 
only twenty-seven years ago that we built what we 
still call the "new barn." At first it used to hold all 
our crops with room to spare, but it does so no 
longer. Any farm fully stocked with cows where 
much grain is purchased and where all the manure 
is carefully saved and wisely used, grows ever more 
productive. I suppose we have doubled crop pro- 
duction since my father's youth. 

I look out across a meadow where there seems 
hardly room for the windrows to lie. Over there 
a half mile is the steep rough hill-pasture, — our 
"mountain." I can see the herd as the animals 
work back and forth across it, — blurs of yellow 
and white on the brown-green background. Above 
the upper line of the pasture the woods begin and 
run to the top, green and deep, wonderfully cool 
and refreshing to the eye. I can remember very 
clearly when I was sure that this horizon was the 
very place where the sky came down. 

It is hot and bright today. I can hear the 
clattering song of the mower on my neighbor's 
farm. I can hear the shouts of our own men as 
they urge the straining horses to drag the heavy 
hayloader up the grades. Every little while — two or 
three times an hour when things are going well — 
a swaying load of hay comes up the lane and is 



148 THE COW 

swallowed up within the barn. I am mowing it 
away. It is hot up here under the roof, as hot 
perhaps as in the steel furnaces where it is the 
fashion to pity the men who toil. It takes only a 
few moments to unload hay by modem methods, 
but it means dust and sweat and weariness. 

So I am moved to a hay-mow meditation. Some- 
times our business seems a curiously futile per- 
formance, like traveling always in a circle. All 
the growing season from April to November we 
toil to grow and gather the crops that shall fill 
the great barns and silos. And then all the re- 
mainder of the year we devote to feeding out the 
crops we have gathered with such pains, and when 
spring comes we have always what we had the 
year before, — an empty barn. And always in fair 
weather and foul we milk the cows. Does it not 
seem a bootless task? Sometimes perhaps I ask 
myself this question. Yet I remember : Take care 
of the soil and the soil will take care of you. For 
a hundred years and more my people have worked 
for this old hill farm, and have lived by it and on 
the whole it has answered to their care. A hundred 
years ago it sent a boy to college and it is sending 
boys and girls to college still. Of the by-gone men 
who tilled it, none ate the bread of idleness and 
none has known want. I like to remember that 
out of its soil for all those years has been nourished 
a wholesome civilization and a generous life. 



INDEX 

Age of cows 107 

American Indians, agriculture of 45 

pioneer and his ox team 24 

Ayrshire cattle 79 

Bakewell, Thomas 12, 173 

Barns, construction of 133 

ornate type not desirable 133 

standard dairy type 135 

Beef cattle 80 

Bos indicus i 23 

taurus 1.9, 22 

Bot-fly ,. 91 

Breeds, selection of , 80 

Bulls, vicious 14 

Calf, barn feeding of during first summer 86 

birth of 16 

care of by its mother 20 

feeding of the 84 

instincts of — 18 

mother love for 17 

pens, construction of 137 

scours 99 

teaching it to drink from a pail 18 

Calling cry for cows 2 

Calves, number to be reared 112 

Catskill Mountains 141 

Cattle, breeds of 74, 78 

Cave man and his cow 21, 23 

Cherry Valley massacre 46 

149 



150 INDEX 

Climate desirable for the dairy farm 131 

Coffee cow 47 

Concrete, used in stable construction 137 

Conformation as a measure of dairy capacity 133 

Contagious abortion ,. . . 99 

Corn-belt farmer 3 

Corn silage 127 

Cow, at pasture and at rest 39 

changed by her environment 34 

color and markings 34 

domestication of 21 

esthetic sense undeveloped . ., 134 

general physical appearance 25 

intelligence of 57 

native country of 10 

pastures 124 

paths , 57 

ties 136 

Cud 28 

Dairy farms 124 

Dehorning cows 31 

Depreciation of dairy herd 110 

Diseases of cattle , 99 

Early cattle breeders ,. . 73 

Evolution of the cow 10 

Farm management for the dairy farm, a system of . . 126 

Fighting among cows and bulls 37 

Fowls, spring-time egg-laying 16 

Free martin 30 

Gait of the cow 38 

Gambrel roofed bams 140 

Garget 103 

Gestation period in the cow i . . 83 

Grades 113 

Gray's Elegy in a Country Church Yard 55 



INDEX 151 

Guernsey cattle 78 

Hambletonian 10 114 

Hay mows 137 

Heifers, age at which to breed 87 

Herd-books 76, 78 

Hill Country 1, 65, 68 

Hillside Farm 141 

pastures 63 

Hollow Horn 29 

Holsteins 78 

Hornless cattle 31 

Horse, method of grazing 28 

Insect pests of cattle 91 

Jerseys 78 

Judging cattle 116 

June pastures 58 

Kerry cattle 32 

Kingdom of the cow 8 

Lice on cattle 92 

Lighting of cow stables 137 

Markets, influence on dairying 7 

outlets for milk 96 

Milk fever 101 

veins 122 

Milking machines 98 

Modern barn methods 48 

Napoleon's dictum 120 

Negroes as dairymen 5 

New York state, dairy importance 49 

Old agricultural East 65 

houses 65 

orchards 63 

stone walls 66 

time dairy ideas 47 

wall layer 69> 



152 INDEX 

"Over shot" barn plan , 139 

Parturient apoplexy 101 

Parturition of the cow 82 

Pastures 50 

ancient and modern times 43 

decline of 57 

treatment of 54 

Permanency of the dairy business 146 

Polled breeds 31 

Potash, dehorning calves with 32 

Primitive cow 9, 11, 12 

Psychology of the cow 40 

Pure-bred cattle 143 

Quack cow doctor 29 

Queen bee, number of eggs laid by 36 

Racial stocks, influence on dairying 6 

Rations, compounding 93 

Regions adapted to dairying 49 

Renewal of the dairy herd 107, 110 

Scale of points in judging cows 118, 119 

Sheep, domestication of 13, 15 

She wolf of Remus and Romulus 25 

Shetland pony 72 

Sluggard's job 142 

Summer versus winter dairying 95 

Social and human factors on the dairy farm 131 

Soil conservation 145 

desirable for dairy farm 130 

Soiling cattle 57 

Spring-time birth of young 15 

Stability of dairy business 144 

Stoke Pogis 3rd 144 

Swine, breeds of 74 

Taming as distinguished from domestication 22 

Teeth of cows 109 



INDEX 153 

Temperature of cow stables 90, 138 

Toilet of cows 31 

Topography of a good dairy farm 130 

Tuberculosis in cows 102 

Twins and multiple births 30 

Udder in cows, sheep, horse and pig 30 

Water buckets in stable 138 

supply for cows 93, 131 

Wedge shape in cows 118 

Weights of cattle 32 

Wild cow of Europe 10 

Winter dairying 95 

Wolf-in-the-tail 29 



